tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-51202022079642898782016-12-09T03:18:52.573-05:00Mein BlogAt Least 800 Words a DayEvan Tuckernoreply@blogger.comBlogger2281125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5120202207964289878.post-22733943994221146062016-12-09T03:18:00.004-05:002016-12-09T03:18:52.603-05:00The Second Iraq War of 2003: A Lecture by Dr. Marvin Vitebsk RevisedAC Charlap: And now a glum lecture on the Second Iraq War of 2003 by Dr. Marvin Vitebsk, Director of the Yitzhak Shamir Foundation on Security Studies and editor-in-chief of the Shamir Foundation's journal - Middle East Defense Quarterly. He's also the Sheldon Adelson Senior Fellow in Media and Education Bias at the Jabotinsky Institute, the Director of International Anti-Israel Propaganda Rapid Response at the BenZion Netanyahu Foundation for Global Research, Second Executive Vice Chairman of the Kahane Committee on the Present Danger, Fourth Vice-Director of the Jesse Helms and Phyllis Schaffly Coalition for a Democratic Minority, Contributing Editor to magazines like Commentary, The Weekly Standard, The National Review, The New Criterion, Frontpage Magazine,&nbsp;The New American, The American Spectator, The American Conservative, The American Standard, and former fellow of the American Enterprise Institute before hitting Richard Perle over the head with a two-by-four. After getting an undergraduate degree in classics at the City College of New York which he paid for by becoming a janitor at the RAND Corporation and then leaking their documents to Maoist China, he then switched allegiances and got all charges dropped by producing visual film to Dean Rusk and Robert McNamara of hitting Zhou Enlai over the head with a two-by-four. Marvin then received two doctoral degrees at the University of Chicago. His first doctoral thesis, entitled Democracy: The American Weakness, was supervised by Allan Bloom. His second doctoral thesis - entitled The Benefits of Mutually Assured Destruction, was supervised by Albert Wohlfstetter. Both theses were published in abridged form as cover stories in Commentary Magazine. While at the University of Chicago, Dr. Vitebsk briefly gained national eminence in a case for which he was prosecuted for assaulting another University of Chicago student with what was misreported as a seven-by-sixteen. He assaulted this student because he advocated for peaceful resistance against capitalist oppression, the student's name was Bernard Sanders - after which he appeared in roundtable discussions on shows hosted by Mike Wallace, Edward R. Murrow, Keith McBee, David Brinkley, Walter Cronkite, and Dick Cavett. His period as a television personality ended however in 1978 when he hit the longtime AFL-CIO director George Meany on the air over the head with what was clearly a two-by-four. He then served as a distinguished congressional aide to Senator Scoop Jackson of Washington and briefly served as Deputy Chief of Staff to Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, until a fight with Moynihan's then Chief of Staff, Timothy Russert, ended with Dr. Vitebsk hitting Mr. Russert over the head with a plywood of indeterminate length. After the Iranian Revolution he made the cover of TIME Magazine for having been the only man in CIA employ to hit both Ayatollah Khomeni and Saddam Hussein over the head - the implement with which he did so however is still classified. After the fall of Communism, Dr. Vitebsk revealed him, though some have disputed his account, as having been the covert CIA assassin of both the brief-tenured Soviet Premieres Andropov and Chernenko, whose deaths the Soviets pretended were due to natural causes as a way of saving face in the international arena, and which enabled the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev and a new generation of Soviet leaders who believed in Glastnost and Perestroika. Once again, the implement with which he assassinated them is classified. Dr. Vitebsk now divides his time between Silver Spring and French Hill in East Jerusalem. We are pleased to have him here in this studio. Dr. Vitebsk.<br /><br />Dr. Vitebsk: Yes, I'm going to begin this lecture by objecting in the most strenuous possible terms to Mr. Charlap's reference to East Jerusalem when in fact Jerusalem is the undisputed and undivided capital of an Israeli state whose borders go from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River and include the entirety of the provinces of Judea and Samaria, which billions of antisemites still refer to as The West Bank and the Gaza Strip.<br /><br />I have been told that my subject today is the Iraq War. How does one begin to talk of something of such existential importance to mankind? The Iraq War was, in fact, the still unresolved and ticking time bomb which is in effect holding the entire world hostage until we defeat it with unconditional victory. As my ex-friend Norman Podhoretz once said, it is prime battle front upon which World War IV was raged, twice in my opinion, the first being the Persian Gulf conflict which is properly called Operation Desert Storm in 1991, again in Operation Iraqi Freedom - which I will not dignify with the name that is generally used, and a third Iraqi conflict which will no doubt soon rage again.<br /><br />You may notice that I say World War IV was raged, for there have not been two world wars, but four. The third was The Cold War, which the antisemitic media unfortunately sold to the United States as a war that could be waged without demanding millions of casualties from the American public at large. This is World War III and it is still ongoing. As a result, we now in 2016 have a still Communist China whose Communism should in fact have in fact been stopped by the President Truman in 1948. We had dozens of perfectly decent atomic bombs at our disposal and Stalin had just barely developed his. By my estimation we could have dropped three dozen atomic bombs on the Chinese mainland and Stalin's second strike capability was still such that he'd only have been able to retaliate by dropping three or four bombs on us. In fact, now that the Soviet Union is gone, the coming conflict with China which is long overdue should be referred to as World War V.<br /><br />But World War IV is the war against Radical Islam; perhaps I should refer to it as World War VI, because we seem to have already lost World War IV. Actually, i would call it World War IX, but we will not get into the other three world wars. What is crucial is that the crisis of Islam's infiltration into the West cannot be more grave. It happens because 41% of Muslim countries experience civil war while only 27% of Christian countries experience it. Muslims have a 3.1 children birth rate per family while Christians have a 2.7 children birth rate per family. There are, in fact, 140,000 Islamic refugees from Syria coming to Germany alone this year, and Germany rejected only two thirds of their applicants for asylum. Once in Europe, the Muslims can take advantage of the handouts offered by the social welfare state. Muslims already make up 5.8% of the German population and 7.5% of the French population. By halfway through the millenium, they may constitute a majority of Europe's population.<br /><br />Antisemitic western liberals like to explain away such things with condescending relativism, treating minorities like children and their differences as something to be celebrated and assimilated into our culture, whereas we are clearly the bastions of liberalism and tolerance, and therefore they must be forced to assimilate and adapt to our culture.<br /><br />I have come up with a three point plan to strengthen liberal resolve. You can find elaboration upon it in a book entitled 'Spine: How to Close the Liberal Soul':<br /><br />1. Antisemitic American and European liberals must be made to uphold the social order. &nbsp;I have infinite faith that the disasters coming to cosmopolitan cities like New York and London and Paris will strengthen liberal resolve. I worry however that the far greater death tolls from the political restrictions of a President like Donald Trump will distract liberals from Islam, the true threat in their midst.<br /><br />2. Government must be shrunk and an ethic of personal responsibility must be facilitated and encouraged to take its place - and I have outlined the proposal for a government department of personal responsibility on the cabinet level that will have offices in every town in America. My antisemitic grandson who protests at rallies to stop the Israeli Occupation tells me that this is a contradiction in terms. He would<br /><br />3. Antisemitic liberals must stop the crude patronization of minorities by insisting that their problems have reasons. Liberals like my third antisemitic ex-wife are, in fact, the true racists, whose programs merely benefit and improve and enrich the lives of impoverished minorities when what they should be doing is forcing minorities to conform to the standards of how to behave that the country sets for them.<br /><br />This of course, necessitates a second plan, which is six points long. You can find an elaboration for this in my book: "Submit: Destroying Democracy to Rebuild It"<br /><br />1. Because of intolerant tolerance of liberals, America is in the direst of crises. Confidence in its authorities is undermined, and because of that, any talk of reforming our institutions must take a back seat to upholding them. Authority must be re-established. While I may disagree with particular policies of a Trump administration, particularly its use of antisemitic propaganda, I am in fact overjoyed that a President has finally come along who will use the office of the Presidency to its fullest capacity, particularly against the coming demographic threat from Islam. American Muslims are now more than a full one percent of American residents, and by 2150 might constitute a full 2.5% of the American population. It would be a disaster for National Security - we would have to register every Muslim in this country and follow all of their whereabouts; though this would actually be good practice for World War XII.<br /><br />2. Only a morally corrupt society questions authority. What ails the United States is not a decline of an economic system, but a decline of values. The individual in contemporary America has too many rights, and therefore uses its rights to pursue happiness. Traditional means of enforcing authority like religion and nationalism have been completely eroded by the counterculture. Just last month I was at a conference in Maine, and I went out to dinner with Abe Foxman and Marty Peretz, and while we were waiting for our Lobster Rolls we all agreed that religion particularly was of paramount importance to enforcing societal norms. Without a God to tell us what to do, what is there to stop us from making our own choices?<br /><br />3. God must drain the swamp of the counterculture, and we must be the gods. The biggest mistake this country ever made was the formation of the middle class - and the middle class is a spoiled class of children. Every subsection of the Middle Class is concerned with its own subsection of issues: their racial and sexual and gender and antisemitic identities and the rights that are due them rather than their responsibilities to their country. A much smaller and more respectable middle class will divert the attention of people back to the issues that truly matter - like the poverty to which the Trump Administration will soon acquaint them.<br /><br />4. We must lower people's expectations of what government and life can do. The more they expect, the more they will protest, and protesting is the first and greatest sign of a decadent and antisemitic society that undermines confidence in its institutional authority. Institutional authority exists to be revered, not to be used. A government that doesn't do anything can never be criticized.<br /><br />5. An intellectual is not an expert, and government should never be administered by experts on their subjects. Particularly by intellectual experts, whose knowledge of the subject is suspect in its select and subjective antisemitism. What is needed is government by a pliable head of state of subaverage intelligence, who can then be molded by a philosophical elite of intellectuals with sufficient morals.<br /><br />6. In order to create this philosophical elite, we must rid ourselves of the pestilence of these antisemitic, fascist, authoritarian, totalitarian university professors who corrupt even our best minds with radical antisemitic theories of social change, and we must do so by firing them all immediately without so much as a hearing about their competence. They have, furthermore, banished conservatives like me and most of my enemies from campus life, and conservative intellectuals unfortunately have to content themselves with jobs in think tanks, corporate consultancies at three times the salary of traditional academics, articles for conservative magazines underwritten by spectacular endowments, paid international vacations to meet with right-wing leaders around the world, and astronomical speaking fees at conservative retreats. We conservative thinkers truly live in a tragic state of affairs.<br /><br />And the way to drain this liberal countercultural swamp can be found in three points, elaborated in my book: "Filth: Why the Middle Class Must Die"<br /><br />1. The reason being that once the antisemitic middle class is fully part again of the working class, their concerns will be no different from the working class. I am heartened to see that Donald Trump, for all his vulgar superficialities, seems to agree with me about the necessity of destroying the Middle Class, and even if I take issue with certain statements of his aide Steve Bannon, I must say that I find him to be a very sympathetic person on the whole, and not at all antisemitic.<br /><br />2. Individual merit is the most precious thing in the world. Therefore, inherited wealth must be maintained at all costs. It would be a shame if wealthy mediocrities would stop running this country, because the antisemitic leaders of this country would be too intelligent to be molded by the virtuousness of the philosophical elite.<br /><br />3. While the government should be perfectly docile in its management of domestic affairs, it must root out moral corruption abroad, lest their corruption contaminate us. The main purpose of government is destroy monsters abroad, because if we do not, their moral swamp will become ours, and we will have to rid ourselves of the antisemitic middle class and their antisemitic vices all over again.<br /><br />4. In addition to Republican politicians of inherited privilege, the ranks of these philosophical elites must consist of traditional Democratic liberal hawks as the Democratic party was from the time of Franklin Roosevelt to Hubert Humphrey, and traditional union leaders like Leon Bates, George Meany, Walter Reuther, and Philip Randolph. All four of whom I've stabbed in bar fights.<br /><br />All this is just a prelude to talking about the Iraq War of 2003, which I still believe is the most important battlefront in World War IV, or, in actuality, World War IX as there are three other world wars I have not yet even spoken of.<br /><br />Charlap: Dr. Vitebsk I'm sorry to interrupt but we really have to...<br /><br />Vitebsk: DIE YOU ANTISEMITIC FILTH!<br /><br />(hits Charlap with two-by-four, two loud thunks, one from the blow, one from an unconscious Charlap hitting the floor)Evan Tuckerhttps://plus.google.com/101333496816879280258noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5120202207964289878.post-42139258365192013082016-12-08T21:50:00.002-05:002016-12-08T22:49:26.756-05:00The Iraq War of 2003: A Lecture from Dr. Marvin VitebskAC Charlap: And now a glum lecture on the Second Iraq War of 2003 by Dr. Marvin Vitebsk, Director of the Yitzhak Shamir Foundation on Security Studies and editor-in-chief of the Shamir Foundation's journal - Middle East Defense Quarterly. He's also the Sheldon Adelson Senior Fellow in Media and Education Bias at the Jabotinsky Institute, the Director of International Anti-Israel Propaganda Rapid Response at the BenZion Netanyahu Foundation for Global Research, Second Executive Vice Chairman of the Kahane Committee on the Present Danger, Fourth Vice-Director of the Jesse Helms and Phyllis Schaffly Coalition for a Democratic Minority, Contributing Editor to magazines like Commentary, The Weekly Standard, The National Review, The New Criterion, Frontpage Magazine,&nbsp;The New American, The American Spectator, The American Conservative, The American Standard, and former fellow of the American Enterprise Institute before hitting Richard Perle over the head with a two-by-four. After getting an undergraduate degree in classics at the City College of New York which he paid for by becoming a janitor at the RAND Corporation and then leaking their documents to Maoist China, he then switched allegiances and got all charges dropped by producing visual film to Dean Rusk and Robert McNamara of hitting Zhou Enlai over the head with a two-by-four. Marvin then received two doctoral degrees at the University of Chicago. His first doctoral thesis, entitled Democracy: The American Weakness, was supervised by Allan Bloom. His second doctoral thesis - entitled The Benefits of Mutually Assured Destruction, was supervised by Albert Wohlfstetter. Both theses were published in abridged form as cover stories in Commentary Magazine. While at the University of Chicago, Dr. Vitebsk briefly gained national eminence in a case for which he was prosecuted for assaulting another University of Chicago student with what was misreported as a seven-by-sixteen. He assaulted this student because he advocated for peaceful resistance against capitalist oppression, the student's name was Bernard Sanders - after which he appeared in roundtable discussions on shows hosted by Mike Wallace, Edward R. Murrow, Keith McBee, David Brinkley, Walter Cronkite, and Dick Cavett. His period as a television personality ended however in 1978 when he hit the longtime AFL-CIO director George Meany on the air over the head with what was clearly a two-by-four. He then served as a distinguished congressional aide to Senator Scoop Jackson of Washington and briefly served as Deputy Chief of Staff to Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, until a fight with Moynihan's then Chief of Staff, Timothy Russert, ended with Dr. Vitebsk hitting Mr. Russert over the head with a plywood of indeterminate length. After the Iranian Revolution he made the cover of TIME Magazine for having been the only man in CIA employ to hit both Ayatollah Khomeni and Saddam Hussein over the head - the implement with which he did so however is still classified. After the fall of Communism, Dr. Vitebsk revealed him, though some have disputed his account, as having been the covert CIA assassin of both the brief-tenured Soviet Premieres Andropov and Chernenko, whose deaths the Soviets pretended were due to natural causes as a way of saving face in the international arena, and which enabled the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev and a new generation of Soviet leaders who believed in Glastnost and Perestroika. Once again, the implement with which he assassinated them is classified. Dr. Vitebsk now divides his time between Silver Spring and French Hill in East Jerusalem. We are pleased to have him here in this studio. Dr. Vitebsk.<br /><br />Dr. Vitebsk: Yes, I'm going to begin this lecture by objecting in the most strenuous possible terms to Mr. Charlap's reference to East Jerusalem when in fact Jerusalem is the undisputed and undivided capital of an Israeli state whose borders go from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River and include the entirety of the provinces of Judea and Samaria, which billions of antisemites still refer to as The West Bank and the Gaza Strip.<br /><br />I have been told that my subject today is the Iraq War. How does one begin to talk of something of such existential importance to mankind? The Iraq War was, in fact, the still unresolved and ticking time bomb which is in effect holding the entire world hostage until we defeat it with unconditional victory. As my ex-friend Norman Podhoretz once said, it is prime battle front upon which World War IV was raged, twice in my opinion, the first being the Persian Gulf conflict of 1991, and which will no doubt soon rage again.<br /><br />You may notice that I say World War IV was raged, for there have not been two world wars, but four. The third was The Cold War, which the antisemitic media unfortunately sold to the United States as a war that could be waged without demanding casualties from the public at large. This is World War III and it is still ongoing. As a result, we now in 2016 have a still Communist China whose Communism should in fact have in fact been stopped by the President Truman in 1948. We had dozens of perfectly decent atomic bombs at our disposal and Stalin had just barely developed his. By my estimation we could have dropped three dozen atomic bombs on the Chinese mainland and Stalin's second strike capability was still such that he'd only have been able to retaliate by dropping three or four bombs on us. In fact, now that the Soviet Union is gone, the coming conflict with China which is long overdue should be referred to as World War V.<br /><br />But World War IV is the war against Radical Islam; perhaps I should refer to it as World War VI, because we seem to have already lost World War IV. 41% of Muslim countries experience civil war while only 27% of Christian countries experience it. Muslims have a 3.1 children birth rate per family while Christians have a 2.7 children birth rate per family. There are, in fact, 140,000 Islamic refugees from Syria coming to Germany alone this year. Once in Europe, the Muslims can take advantage of the social welfare state to have still more children, until they have so many children that they can take over the state. Muslims already make up 5.8% of the German population and 7.5% of the French population. As you can see, the crisis of Islam's infiltration of the West cannot be more grave.<br /><br />Antisemitic western liberals like to explain away such things with condescending relativism, treating minorities like children and their differences as something to be celebrated and assimilated into our culture, whereas we are clearly the bastions of liberalism and tolerance, and they must assimilate and adapt to our culture.<br /><br />I have come up with a three point plan to strengthen liberal resolve. You can find elaboration upon it in a book entitled 'Spine: How to Close the Liberal Soul':<br /><br />1. Antisemitic American and European liberals must be reasoned with and if that proves impossible, compelled to uphold the social order. They must feel as though they have no choice but to become our allies - I have infinite faith that the coming disasters which Islamism will bring to &nbsp;cosmopolitan cities like New York and London and Paris will strengthen liberal resolve. I worry however that the far greater death tolls from the political restrictions of a President like Donald Trump will blind liberals to the true threat in their midst.<br />2. That antisemitic liberals must be made to realize that a massive inhuman government cannot provide solutions to problems that individuals create. Government must be shrunk and an ethic of personal responsibility must be facilitated and encouraged to take its place - and I have outlined the proposal for a government department of personal responsibility on the cabinet level that will have offices in every town in America. My antisemitic grandson who protests at rallies to stop the Israeli Occupation tells me that this is a contradiction in terms. He would.<br />3. Antisemitic liberals must stop the crude patronization of minorities by insisting that their problems have reasons. Liberals like my antisemitic ex-wife are, in fact, the true racists, whose programs merely benefit and improve and enrich the lives of impoverished minorities when what they should be doing is forcing minorities to conform to the standards of how to behave that the country sets for them, thereby making them part of the majority with no need for diversity.<br /><br />This of course, necessitates a second plan, which is six points long. You can find an elaboration for this in my book: "Submit: Destroying Democracy to Rebuild It"<br /><br />1. Because of intolerant tolerance of antisemtiic liberals, America is in the direst of crises. Confidence in its authorities is undermined, and because of that, any talk of reforming our institutions must take a back seat to upholding them. Authority must be re-established. And here is when I must issue a reason for hope in a Trump administration. While I may disagree with particular policies of a Trump administration, particularly its use of antisemitic propaganda, I am in fact overjoyed that a President has finally come along who will use the office of the Presidency to its fullest capacity, particularly against the coming demographic threat from Islam. American Muslims are now more than a full one percent of American residents, and by 2150 might constitute a full 2.5% of the American population. This must not be allowed to happen, and the consequences of such growth cannot be overestimated.<br />2. This is an issue of moral corruption. What ails the United States is not a decline of an economic system, but a decline of values and standards. The individual in contemporary America simply has too many rights, and therefore concentrates itself on the satiation of pleasure. Traditional means of enforcing community standards like religion and nationalism have been completely eroded by the counterculture. Just last month I was at a conference in Maine, and I went out to dinner with Abe Foxman and Marty Peretz, and while we were waiting for our Lobster Rolls we all agreed that religion particularly was of paramount importance to enforcing societal norms. Without a God to tell us what to do, what is there to stop us from making our own choices?<br />3. The swamp of counterculture must be utterly drained. Perhaps the worst mistake this country ever made was the GI Bill, which allowed for a large and antisemitic middle class. Rather than promote solidarity with the old trade union issues like wages and working conditions, every part of the middle class is concerned with its own subsection of issues: their racial and sexual and gender and antisemitic identities and the rights that are due them rather than their responsibilities to their community and country. These issues reflect a spoiled and antisemitic nation of children who never had to look after their own private property. Perhaps a much smaller, much more responsible and respectable middle class will divert the attention of people back to the issues that truly matter - like the poverty to which we will soon acquaint them.<br />4. We must lower people's expectations of what government and life can do. The more they expect, the more they will protest, and protesting is the first and greatest sign of a decadent and antisemitic society that undermines confidence in its institutional authority, which should aim not only be unquestioned in speech but also in thought. Institutional authority exists to be revered, but never used. A government that doesn't do anything can never be criticized.<br />5. Intellectuals must particularly comply with these codes of standards so that they do not corrupt the public with insufficient ethical standards. An intellectual is not an expert, and government should never be administered by experts on their subjects. Particularly by intellectual experts, whose knowledge of the subject is suspect in its select subjective antisemitism. What is needed is government by an absolutely ordinary, pliable head of state of subaverage intelligence, who can then be molded by a philosophical elite of intellectuals with sufficient morals.<br />6. In order to create this philosophical elite, we must rid ourselves of the pestilence of these antisemitic, fascist, authoritarian, totalitarian university professors who corrupt even our best minds with radical antisemitic theories of social change, and we must do so by firing them all immediately without so much as a hearing about their competence. They have, furthermore, banished conservatives like me from campus life, and conservative intellectuals unfortunately have to content themselves with jobs in think tanks, corporate consultancies at three times the salary of traditional academics, articles for conservative magazines underwritten by spectacular endowments, paid international vacations to meet with right-wing leaders around the world, and astronomical speaking fees at conservative retreats. We truly live in a tragic state of affairs.<br /><br />And the way to drain this liberal countercultural swamp can be found in three points, elaborated in my book: "Filth: Why the Middle Class Must Die"<br /><br />1. After consigning the antisemitic American Middle Class back to the Working Class, we can then remold them free of moral corruption as the salt of the Earth American working class still is and has always been. Once the antisemitic middle class is fully part again of the working class, their concerns will be no different from the working class. I am heartened to see that Donald Trump, for all his vulgar superficialities, seems to agree with me about the necessity of destroying the Middle Class, and even if I take issue with certain statements of his aide Steve Bannon, I must say that I find him to be a very sympathetic person on the whole, and not at all antisemitic.<br />2. Individual merit is the most precious thing in the world. Therefore, inherited wealth must be maintained at all costs. If inherited wealth is not maintained, the antisemitic leaders of this country will be too intelligent to be molded by the virtuousness of the philosophical elite. And therefore, the public will be unable to achieve any meaningful sort of individual merit.<br />3. While the government should be perfectly docile in its management of domestic affairs, it must root out moral corruption abroad, lest their corruption contaminate us. The main purpose of government is destroy monsters abroad, because if we do not, their moral swamp will become ours, and we will have to rid ourselves of the antisemitic middle class and their antisemitic vices all over again.<br />4. In addition to Republican politicians of inherited privilege, the ranks of these philosophical elites must consist of traditional Democratic liberal hawks as the Democratic party was from the time of Franklin Roosevelt to Hubert Humphrey, accompanied by neoconservative academics like myself and most of my enemies, and traditional union leaders like Leon Bates, George Meany, Walter Reuther, and Philip Randolph. All four of whom I've stabbed in bar fights.<br /><br />All this is just a prelude to talking about the Iraq War of 2003, which I still believe is the most important battlefront in World War IV, or, in actuality, World War IX as there are three other world wars I have not yet even spoken of.<br /><br />Charlap: Dr. Vitebsk I'm sorry to interrupt but we really have to...<br /><br />(hits Charlap with two-by-four, two loud thunks, one from the blow, one from an unconscious Charlap hitting the floor)Evan Tuckerhttps://plus.google.com/101333496816879280258noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5120202207964289878.post-46758962514422066572016-12-04T21:57:00.001-05:002016-12-04T21:57:14.398-05:00An Orchestral Sea Program<br /><br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_axxxYiVIs&amp;list=PLE95311E327C9E7EE&amp;index=5">Zemlinsky: Die Seejungfrau III</a><br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1JUyhzh3WM">Vaughan Williams: Sea Symphony On The Beach at Night Alone (arranged for Orchestra, Contralto and woman's chorus)</a><br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZJMjumZCGM">Britten: Moonlight</a><br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sEDHaJ1mn5M">Elgar: Sea Pictures: Sea Slumber</a><br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBckxpC7W9w">Elgar: Sea Pictures: Where Corals Lie</a><br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nm8acCdTsgY">Bridge: The Sea: Moonlight</a><br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-K-34IvkpoI&amp;list=PLE95311E327C9E7EE&amp;index=3">Zemlinsky: Die Seejungfrau II</a><br />Intermission<br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=692noeACXrs">Britten: Four Sea Interludes Dawn</a><br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tnl1ED2UjRs">Mussorgsky: Dawn Over the Moscow River</a><br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HqSAQzYE0VI">Britten: Four Sea Interludes Sunday Morning</a><br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xh0BJmhzT1A">Elgar: Sea Pictures: Sabbath Morning</a>&nbsp;at Sea<br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pyoM2UqdYOE">Debussy: La Mer 1</a><br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SvMboyPpVMk&amp;spfreload=1">Debussy: La Mer 2</a><br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJtjIzcRsRw">Debussy: Sirenes</a><br />Intermission<br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5hexTnjHKA">Mendelssohn: Hebrides Overture</a><br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CcMMI2ws2Ss">Sibelius: The Oceanides</a><br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_9HXKRs7II">Debussy: La Mer 3</a><br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PITgvtg7AE0">Frank Bridge: The Sea: Storm</a><br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2X7JDvTarqQ">Britten: Four Sea Interludes: Storm</a><br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nEcyCEAm1Mg">Wagner: Flying Dutchman Overture</a><br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GauIMo8Manc">Elgar: Sea Pictures: The Swimmer</a><br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4I17oDiY3sM">Mendelssohn: Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage</a><br /><div><br /></div>Evan Tuckerhttps://plus.google.com/101333496816879280258noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5120202207964289878.post-15860855134232046782016-12-01T04:41:00.000-05:002016-12-01T05:01:25.896-05:00"How Did We Get Here": A Cultural History of the 21st Century Episode 0 - First Quarter Rewritten<div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #404040; margin: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 1em; text-indent: -1em; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot; , &quot;helvetica&quot; , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">I leant upon a coppice gate&nbsp;</span></div><div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #404040; margin: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 1em; text-indent: -1em; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot; , &quot;helvetica&quot; , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;When Frost was spectre-grey,&nbsp;</span></div><div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #404040; margin: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 1em; text-indent: -1em; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot; , &quot;helvetica&quot; , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">And Winter's dregs made desolate&nbsp;</span></div><div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #404040; margin: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 1em; text-indent: -1em; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot; , &quot;helvetica&quot; , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;The weakening eye of day.&nbsp;</span></div><div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #404040; margin: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 1em; text-indent: -1em; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot; , &quot;helvetica&quot; , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">The tangled bine-stems scored the sky&nbsp;</span></div><div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #404040; margin: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 1em; text-indent: -1em; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot; , &quot;helvetica&quot; , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Like strings of broken lyres,&nbsp;</span></div><div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #404040; margin: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 1em; text-indent: -1em; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot; , &quot;helvetica&quot; , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">And all mankind that haunted nigh&nbsp;</span></div><div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #404040; margin: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 1em; text-indent: -1em; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot; , &quot;helvetica&quot; , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Had sought their household fires.&nbsp;</span></div><div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #404040; margin: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 1em; text-indent: -1em; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot; , &quot;helvetica&quot; , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><br style="margin-bottom: 0px;" /></span></div><div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #404040; margin: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 1em; text-indent: -1em; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot; , &quot;helvetica&quot; , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">The land's sharp features seemed to be&nbsp;</span></div><div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #404040; margin: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 1em; text-indent: -1em; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot; , &quot;helvetica&quot; , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;The Century's corpse outleant,&nbsp;</span></div><div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #404040; margin: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 1em; text-indent: -1em; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot; , &quot;helvetica&quot; , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">His crypt the cloudy canopy,&nbsp;</span></div><div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #404040; margin: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 1em; text-indent: -1em; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot; , &quot;helvetica&quot; , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;The wind his death-lament.&nbsp;</span></div><div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #404040; margin: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 1em; text-indent: -1em; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot; , &quot;helvetica&quot; , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">The ancient pulse of germ and birth&nbsp;</span></div><div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #404040; margin: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 1em; text-indent: -1em; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot; , &quot;helvetica&quot; , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Was shrunken hard and dry,&nbsp;</span></div><div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #404040; margin: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 1em; text-indent: -1em; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot; , &quot;helvetica&quot; , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">And every spirit upon earth&nbsp;</span></div><div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #404040; margin: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 1em; text-indent: -1em; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot; , &quot;helvetica&quot; , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Seemed fervourless as I.&nbsp;</span></div><div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #404040; margin: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 1em; text-indent: -1em; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot; , &quot;helvetica&quot; , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><br style="margin-bottom: 0px;" /></span></div><div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #404040; margin: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 1em; text-indent: -1em; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot; , &quot;helvetica&quot; , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">At once a voice arose among&nbsp;</span></div><div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #404040; margin: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 1em; text-indent: -1em; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot; , &quot;helvetica&quot; , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;The bleak twigs overhead&nbsp;</span></div><div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #404040; margin: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 1em; text-indent: -1em; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot; , &quot;helvetica&quot; , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">In a full-hearted evensong&nbsp;</span></div><div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #404040; margin: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 1em; text-indent: -1em; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot; , &quot;helvetica&quot; , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Of joy illimited;&nbsp;</span></div><div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #404040; margin: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 1em; text-indent: -1em; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot; , &quot;helvetica&quot; , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,&nbsp;</span></div><div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #404040; margin: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 1em; text-indent: -1em; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot; , &quot;helvetica&quot; , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;In blast-beruffled plume,&nbsp;</span></div><div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #404040; margin: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 1em; text-indent: -1em; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot; , &quot;helvetica&quot; , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">Had chosen thus to fling his soul&nbsp;</span></div><div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #404040; margin: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 1em; text-indent: -1em; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot; , &quot;helvetica&quot; , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Upon the growing gloom.&nbsp;</span></div><div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #404040; margin: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 1em; text-indent: -1em; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot; , &quot;helvetica&quot; , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><br style="margin-bottom: 0px;" /></span></div><div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #404040; margin: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 1em; text-indent: -1em; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot; , &quot;helvetica&quot; , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">So little cause for carolings&nbsp;</span></div><div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #404040; margin: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 1em; text-indent: -1em; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot; , &quot;helvetica&quot; , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Of such ecstatic sound&nbsp;</span></div><div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #404040; margin: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 1em; text-indent: -1em; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot; , &quot;helvetica&quot; , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">Was written on terrestrial things&nbsp;</span></div><div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #404040; margin: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 1em; text-indent: -1em; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot; , &quot;helvetica&quot; , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Afar or nigh around,&nbsp;</span></div><div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #404040; margin: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 1em; text-indent: -1em; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot; , &quot;helvetica&quot; , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">That I could think there trembled through&nbsp;</span></div><div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #404040; margin: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 1em; text-indent: -1em; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot; , &quot;helvetica&quot; , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;His happy good-night air&nbsp;</span></div><div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #404040; margin: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 1em; text-indent: -1em; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot; , &quot;helvetica&quot; , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew&nbsp;</span></div><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: &quot;arial&quot; , &quot;helvetica&quot; , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"></span><br /><div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #404040; margin: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 1em; text-indent: -1em; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot; , &quot;helvetica&quot; , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;And I was unaware.&nbsp;</span></div><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: &quot;arial&quot; , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: &quot;arial&quot; , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">Thomas Hardy was born a little too late. He was a generation younger than the great Victorian intellectuals who represented Merry Old England at the optimistic zenith of its Victorian Era; writers and thinkers like Dickens and Thackeray and Tennyson and John Stuart Mill and Matthew Arnold and George Eliot and Cardinal Newman and Thomas Carlyle and John Ruskin and Benjamin Disraeli and William Gladstone - men, and at least one woman who took a man's name - so influential that they defined a country and a century. The world has moved on from their overly proper and priggish optimism and their peculiar and pecuniary liberalism, but it was, for better or worse, probably the best the world was going to do in the 19th century, and a hell of a lot better than what lay in store at the start of the 20th.&nbsp;</span><br /><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: &quot;arial&quot; , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">The only way that a still greater and more equitable liberalism than the Victorian liberalism that allowed for the vicissitudes of imperialism and would ever be born was to emerge from a meat grinder of death - a blood sacrifice which demanded more than two hundred million victims and made no distinction between the conservatives who held a more equitable world back, the progressives who aimed to create a greater world, and the already oppressed of both the European lower classes and the oppressed of imperial rule in Asia, Africa, and occasionally Latin America - the very people who could have benefited most had they survived the great harvest. Was it worth it? &nbsp;</span><br /><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: &quot;arial&quot; , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: &quot;arial&quot; , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">Hardy was one of nature's great pessimists.&nbsp;</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: &quot;arial&quot; , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">English Literature was ruled at the mid-19th century by Charles Dickens, the ultimate optimist and a poet of hope, who passed his characters through terrible tribulations so that they might emerge more triumphant in the end. Late century English lit was ruled, if by anyone at all, by Hardy.&nbsp;</span><br /><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: &quot;arial&quot; , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">Two thirds of the way through his career, at roughly the Century's turn, he abandoned novels for poetry, perhaps because he had too much gloom in his outlook to render any longer his sour thoughts on life with the ambiguities that narrative demands. When he wrote those immortal sixteen couplets of The Darkling Thrush, was his foreboding for his own soul's future, was it foreboding for people he loved, was it for Englands, the world's?&nbsp;</span><br /><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: &quot;arial&quot; , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: &quot;arial&quot; , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">We are now 116 years after The Darkling Thrush, and there are three people alive in 2016 that were alive in 1900 - none of whom was born before 1899. No one is alive today who can tell us whether or not living in 2016 feels like living in 1900, but I would imagine that a certain kind of liberal felt a foreboding that could not be quenched.&nbsp;</span><br /><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: &quot;arial&quot; , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: &quot;arial&quot; , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">The historian Niall Ferguson, no liberal he, wrote of 1901 that an "inhabitant of London could, as he sipped his breakfast tea, have ordered a sack of coal from Cardiff, a pair of kid gloves from Paris or a box of cigars from Havana. He might also, if anticipating a visit to the grouse moors of Scotland, have purchased a 'Bradalbane Waterproof and self-ventilating Shooting Costume (cape and kilt); or he might, if his interests lay in a different direction, have ordered a copy of Maurice C. Hime's book entitled Schoolboy's Special Immorality. He could have invested his money in any one of nearly fifty US companies quoted in London - most of them railroads like the Denver and Rio Grande (whose latest results were reported that day) - or, if he preferred, in one of the seven other stock markets also covered regularly by The Times. He might, if he felt the urge to travel, have booked himself passage on the P&amp;O liner Peninsular, which was due to sail for Bombay and Karachi the next day, or on one of the twenty-three other P&amp;O ships scheduled to sale for Eastern destinations over the next ten weeks - to say nothing of the thirty-six other shipping lines ofering services from England to all the corners of the globe. Did New York seem to beckon? The Manitou sailed tomorrow, or he could wait for the Hamburg-America Line's more luxurious Furst Bismarck, which sailed him from Southampton on the 13th. Did Buenos Aires appeal to him more? Did he perhaps wish to see for himself how the city's Grand National Tramway Company was using - or rather, losing - his money? Very well, the Danube, departing for Argentina on Friday, still had some cabins free. The world, in short, was his oyster."</span><br /><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: &quot;arial&quot; , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: &quot;arial&quot; , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">Where stand we in 2016? An inhabitant of the Washington DC metropolitan area, as he, or still depressingly seldom she, sips on their Sunday brunch mimosas, can whip out an I-phone and go on Amazon and there they can order five pounds of replica fat for $70, an old Asian man peel and stick wall decal for $30, a Nicholas Cage pillow case for $8, two ounces of weed for $5, a Kaylen's hand butt plug for $30, a fifty-five gallon drum of lube for $1350, a Roswell New Mexico soil sample for $16, a badonkadonk land cruiser for $20,000 and $500 shipping, an infant circumcision trainer for $192,1,500 lady bugs for $6.25, &nbsp;a sexy inflatable sheep made to look like Dolly the first cloned sheep for $7.50,&nbsp;a stegosaurus dog costume for $28, 32 ounces of wolf urine for $100, an underpants dispenser for $11, a complete body unitard for $70, and uranium ore for $40. If they wanted to book a trip anywhere in the world, they could find literally hundreds of websites devoted not only to saving money on the trip, but earning money by taking a trip. They could find online classifieds&nbsp;</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: &quot;arial&quot; , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">houseswapping and housesitting and dozens of&nbsp;</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: &quot;arial&quot; , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">websites to advise them on how to get the most value out of it, they could be subsidized for years by a non-profit to volunteer and fundraise on a development project, they could look at online forums for hitchhiking and carpooling and many websites devoted exclusively how to do either/or of them safely, message boards for staffing yachts and advice on how to crew it, applications to crew a cruise on any major cruiseline's website, they can inquire onto car rental websites for people who've just moved and need vehicles driven from the place they live to a far off place, they can offer to work at a hostel rather than pay it, they can organize a group tour for which they act as both agent and guide.</span><br /><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: &quot;arial&quot; , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: &quot;arial&quot; , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">Some people would say that this is the way that the world's true masters anesthetize us to the world's truest concerns by dangling consumerism and commodities in front of us and forcing us creative types to hustle our way into the lower middle class while the less imaginative and risky of us reap the world's true benefits. Many others, including me, would say that this is evidence that the world is particularly our oyster. The reason we focus on how to procure our own trivial delights not because we are slaves to the world, but because we are its masters, and once again, the world may demand remittance on our trivial concerns with a payment not in in dollars or coin of the realm, but in pounds of blood. &nbsp;</span><br /><br />(cue music)<br /><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: &quot;arial&quot; , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: &quot;arial&quot; , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">Greetings, salutations, welcome, and all due appropriate sentiments to this episode #0 of "How We Got Here: A Cultural History of the 21st Century."&nbsp;</span><br /><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: small;"><br /></div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: small;">Let's start with the first thesis of this series, and then divert enormously from it. We have just emerged from the Television Era. I believe that in the past generation, it is not movies or music that has represented us most accurately, however well some in each field of the Arts do, and it's certainly not fiction or art. Far more than any other medium, TV gives its creators the freedom and diversity to show our lives accurately, and I aim to show that as best I can.<br /><br />This podcaster was born at the cusp between Generation X and Millennials, we were not only born in the television era, but even our parents can't remember a time before television. But our parents grew up with three basic networks, we grew up with thirty, and by the time we became adults, we had 300. I would imagine that we are now in the Podcast Era - hence why I'm here. But in some ways there is as great a difference between TV and Television as there is between either of them and podcasts. TV is entertainment, Television is art. TV is escapist, Television is cathartic. TV exists to comfort us, Television exists to drive us mad.&nbsp;</div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: small;"><br /></div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: small;">I would date the emergence of Television from TV to somewhere between the final episode of Seinfeld in May 1998 and the pilot episode of The Sopranos in January of 1999. Something in the American air changed sometime during the last seven months of 1998 much as they seemed to change again around the Fall of 2014.&nbsp;</div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: small;"><br /></div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: small;">The thirties were the decade of fascism, the eighties were the decade when Communism fell. The nineties were the decade of the blowjob. The 'quote-unquote Great Event', the most famous of 1998, and indeed, of the whole decade, was the Lewinsky investigation and the Clinton impeachment, which everyone both Right and Left agreed, represented an absolute low in American discourse - during a period so seemingly prosperous and indolent that the country had nothing better to do for an entire year than talk about the President getting head underneath the desk of the Oval Office. Nevertheless, this roughly seven-month period between Seinfeld and The Sopranos set much of the stage for everything that would later come - no pun intended, honestly.<br /><br />The great political development of that period was the emergence, and a word like 'emergence' hardly does justice to the effect it had on America, of the Drudge Report. Traditional news, even 24-hour TV news, even FOX News, could not possibly keep up with the proliferation of trivial but distracting political stories, or entirely made up stories, that cater to and inflame the prejudices of people who believe in the inherent bias of traditional respectable journalists who practice journalism through the same process since the founding of The Spectator in the 1720's - and if not that many millions of people believed that traditional news had no bias before the Drudge Report, then the Drudge Report alone convinced millions. No newspaper, not even the Wall Street Journal, no yellow journalism, not even the Daily Mail, no television network, not even FOX news, could ever shape hearts and minds with the ferocious prowess of an aggregating website that could send its audience down a rabbithole of information, often false but certainly not always, that was available to them at the click of a mouse.<br /><br />But if you think Drudge Report isn't a substantial enough event to mark the passing of one era to another, then for this period that contributed to American life and history - one should remember was that this was the period when the bulk of debate was conducted over whether to repeal the Glass-Steagal act, a financial act passed barely more than three months into the Franklin Roosevelt administration. Glass-Steagal was the most important substance of the Banking Act of 1933 which established a wall between commercial banks and securities firms. What Glass-Steagall meant in laymen terms is that a commercial bank at which middle class people could store their money with expectations that the money would stay put, could not itself be invested in stocks and funds so that banks could potentially make more money for both the bank and for its customers. In theory, eliminating the separation can reap incredible financial benefits to both bankers and their customers, and in practice, that's exactly what happened until The Great Recession of 2008, just as it's exactly what happened until The Great Depression of 1929. Both times, it was shown pretty much definitively that commercial banks trying to increase their holdings through the stock market was spectacularly irresponsible.<br /><br />I suppose I'm giving away my political bias right at the beginning of this series - are there really that many conservative podcasters anyway? You'll quickly see that compared to most progressive podcasters I'll seem downright conservative, but I am a liberal, through and through, clinging to it like a religion in insecure times precisely because liberalism is the most insecure of all philosophies, a coreless, constantly evolving and debated theology that ultimately seems to adapt itself from era to era for the specific needs of that particular historical moment. But regardless of whether one is liberal or conservative, moderate or progressive, alt-right or intersectional warrior for social justice, everyone seems to agree that something extremely dangerous happened in American life during this period - even if we all disagree about what the particular dangers were that we passed. Whatever the center of American life was, whatever America's basic expectations and routines were, it seemed to be hollowed out sometime around that infamous year of 1998.<br /><br />Around the corner was the twenty-first century, and while America is still unquestionably the world's only superpower, we are all the more vulnerable because of our indispensability, and every American would seem to agree that the 21st century beset our country with an endless parade of hopelessness. Not hopelessness by the standards of history, but hopelessness by the standards of the most prosperous and wealthiest nation in the history of our planet. Nobody knows what 2017 will bring, but there is no question, even in 2016, even in December 2016 (!), that a person desiring to make a success of him or herself has the best possible chances right here, and right now, to rise and lift oneself from poverty.<br /><br />Lifting oneself up from poverty does not mean alleviating one's hardships through social programs while still contenting oneself with little more than a minimum though living wage as progressives like to believe, and contrary to what conservatives believe, it can be done while still respecting the economic rights of communities and refraining from the exploitation of others to achieve one's goals. But to rise in financial security and status to a place of self-respect and pride, and to create an identity, a security, a future, a career, and a freedom for oneself, is still something that has happened in America tens of millions, perhaps hundreds of millions of times more often than any other place in the world.<br /><br />Since I would imagine that it is mostly liberals, progressives, and socialists, who would listen to this, I would like to point out to them a certain quote. "The lessons of history, confirmed by the evidence immediately before me, show conclusively that continued dependence upon relief induces a spiritual and moral disintegration fundamentally destructive to the national fibre. To dole out relief in this way is to administer a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit. It is inimical to the dictates of sound policy. It is in violation of the traditions of America." &nbsp;This quote was from the 1935 State of the Union address, it was given by Franklin Delano Roosevelt.<br /><br />The human spirit,... spiritual and moral disintegration,... how old-fashioned, how out of touch, how quasi-religious and conservative, how bourgeois those terms sound to the enlightened modern ear which can't help but hear the echoes of Bill O'Reilly or Newt Gingrich or Margaret Thatcher talking about the corrosive effects of dependence on a citizen's ability to lift himself up by the bootstraps. But what other option has there ever been? What other motivator moves a society to prosperity? Socialists and Marxists, and sometimes even Progressives, would have us believe that a dream of self-respect is just something which we would all have innately if companies and their advertisers did not constantly deny them to us. According to such people, these are all part of the lies told from inside the whirlwind of the great neoliberal machine, which gives us feelings of security and freedom and achievement precisely by taking these feelings away from us, and always depriving us of any real version of all three.<br /><br />The various substrata of leftist religions can never seem to agree upon a solution to this matter, the reason being as clear as day to its Doubting Thomases that there can be no solution to a problem that doesn't exist. Neither corporations or governments can deprive us of self-actualization when they are both extraordinary products of the human mind and its miraculous powers of organization. Both private and public organizations can be and are used for good and ill, and both are used for good and ill billions of times every day. The problem is neither corporations nor governments, the problem is the messy minds that thought of them both, organized them both, keep both running, use them both, exploit them both, and heal them both. Just as President Obama says that we are the one's we've been waiting for, we are also the ones keeping ourselves waiting. It is neither possible nor desirable to eradicate either or even shrink them significantly. But even if it were, it would be in the interests of every living being on the planet to keep both of these literally superhuman entities which simultaneously control us and are controlled by us to operate in good health and be as representative of our interests as any organization can possibly be by being so inflexible in how both are regulated that we endow both with the flexibility to check the most oppressive impulses of the other.<br /><br /></div>Evan Tuckerhttps://plus.google.com/101333496816879280258noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5120202207964289878.post-15025531529562830492016-11-28T23:24:00.000-05:002016-11-29T00:00:38.218-05:00How We Got Here: A Cultural History of the 21st Century - Episode 0 (not quite final draft)<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: &quot;arial&quot; , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">Greetings, salutations, welcome, and all due appropriate sentiments to this episode #0 of "How We Got Here: A Cultural History of the 21st Century."&nbsp;</span><br /><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: small;"><br /></div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: small;">Let's get to the point, and then divert enormously from it. We have just emerged from the Television era. I believe that in the past generation, it is not movies or music that has represented us most accurately, however well some in each field of the Arts do, and it's certainly not fiction or art. Far more than any other medium, TV gives its creators the freedom and diversity to show our lives accurately.&nbsp; This podcaster was born at the cusp between Generation X and Millennials, we were not only born in the television era, but even our parents can't remember a time before television. But our parents grew up with three basic networks, we grew up with thirty, and by the time we became adults, we had 300.&nbsp;</div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: small;"><br /></div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: small;">I would imagine that we are now in the Podcast Era - hence why I'm here. But there is a great difference between TV and Television. TV is entertainment, Television is art. TV is escapist, Television is cathartic. TV exists to comfort us, Television exists to drive us mad.&nbsp;</div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: small;"><br /></div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: small;">I would date the emergence of Television rather than TV to somewhere between the final episode of Seinfeld in May 1998 and the pilot episode of The Sopranos in January of 1999. Something in the American air changed during those months much as they seemed to in the Fall of 2014.&nbsp;</div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: small;"><br /></div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: small;">The thirties were the decade of fascism, the eighties were the decade when Communism fell. The nineties were the decade of the blowjob. The 'quote-unquote Great Event', the most famous of 1998, and indeed, of the whole decade, was the Lewinsky investigation and the Clinton impeachment, which everyone both Right and Left agreed, represented an absolute low in American discourse - during a period so seemingly prosperous and indolent that the country had nothing better to do but to talk about for an entire year than the President getting head underneath the desk of the Oval Office. Nevertheless, this roughly nine-month period between Seinfeld and The Sopranos set the stage for everything that would come - sincerely no pun intended. The great political development of that period was the Drudge Report - traditional news, even 24 hour news, even FOX News, could not possibly keep up with the proliferation of trivial but distracting political stories, or entirely made up stories, that cater to the prejudices of people who believe that traditional journalism as practiced by newspapers since the founding of The Spectator in the 1720's - and if not that many millions of people believed that traditional news had no bias before the Drudge Report, the Drudge Report alone convinced millions. No newspaper, not even the Wall Street Journal, no yellow journalism, not even the Daily Mail, no television network, not even FOX news, could ever keep up with an aggregating website that could send its audience down a rabbithole of information, often false but certainly not always, that was available to them at the click of a button. But if one needs a substantive great event for this period that contributed to American life and history - one should remember was that this was the period when the bulk of debate was conducted over whether to repeal the Glass-Steagal act, a financial act passed barely more than three months months into the Franklin Roosevelt administration. Glass-Steagal was the most important substance of the Banking Act of 1933 which established a wall between commercial banks and securities firms. What Glass-Steagall meant in laymen terms is that a commercial bank at which middle class people could store their money with expectations that the money would stay put, could not itself be invested in stocks and funds so that banks could potentially make more money for both the bank and for its customers. In theory, eliminating the separation can reap incredible financial benefits to both bankers and their customers, and in practice, that's exactly what happened until The Great Recession of 2008, just as it's exactly what happened until The Great Depression of 1929. Both times, it was shown pretty much definitively that commercial banks trying to increase their holdings through the stock market was spectacularly irresponsible - I suppose I'm giving away my political bias right at the beginning of this series - are there really that many conservative podcasters anyway? You'll quickly see that compared to most progressive podcasters I'll seem downright conservative, but I am a liberal, through and through, clinging to it like a religion in insecure times because liberalism is the most insecure of all philosophies, a constantly evolving corelessness that adapts itself from era to era for the needs of the moment. But regardless of whether one is liberal or conservative, moderate or progressive, alt-right or intersectional warrior for social justice, everyone seems to agree that something extremely dangerous happened in American life during this period - even if we all disagree about what the particular dangers were that we passed. Whatever the center of American life was, whatever America's basic expectations and routines were, it seemed to be hollowed out sometime around that infamous year of 1998. Around the corner was the twenty-first century, and while America is still unquestionably the world's #1 world power, we are all the more vulnerable because of our indispensability, and every American would seem to agree that the 21st century beset our country with an endless parade of hopelessness. Not hopelessness by the standards of history, but hopelessness by the standards of the most prosperous and wealthiest nation in the history of the Earth. There is no question, even in 2016, that a person desiring to make a success of himself has the best possible chances right here, and right now, to rise and lift oneself from poverty. Not to alleviate one's hardships through social programs, not to create success on the exploitation of others, but to rise in financial security and status to a place of self-respect and pride, and to create an identity, a security, a future, a career, and a freedom for oneself. Even Franklin Roosevelt said in his 1935 State of the Union Address that: "The lessons of history, confirmed by the evidence immediately before me, show conclusively that continued dependence upon relief induces a spiritual and moral disintegration fundamentally destructive to the national fibre. To dole out relief in this way is to administer a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit. It is inimical to the dictates of sound policy. It is in violation of the traditions of America."<br /><br />The human spirit,... spiritual and moral disintegration,... how old-fashioned, how out of touch, how quasi-religious, how conservative, how bourgeois those terms sound to the enlightened modern ear which can't help but hear the echoes of Bill O'Reilly or Newt Gingrich or Margaret Thatcher talking about corrosive effects of dependence on a citizen's ability to lift himself up by the bootstraps. And yet, what other option has there ever been? What other motivator moves a society to prosperity? Socialists and particularly Marxists, occasionally even Progressives, would have us believe that such needs are all part of the lies told in the whirlwind of the great neoliberal machine, which gives us false feelings of security and freedom and achievement, all the while depriving us of all three under our very noses. The various substrata of leftist religions can never seem to agree upon a solution to this matter, the reason being as clear as day to its non-adherents that there is no solution. It should go without saying, but in case there's any doubt: as a liberal, one owes it to the public to make the way up the ladder as easy as possible; and no matter what the O'Reillys and Gingriches say to demonize the people who haven't made it, it's not only possible to make the ladder easier to climb, but everybody's interest to do so. Nevertheless, every era and country has its radicals, secular or religious it doesn't matter, who think that by breaking the ladder of prosperity into smaller pieces, the ladder can then be rebuilt taller and more sturdy than ever to enable everyone to climb it, and yet every time, the only result is that the ladder is broken. Giving to others, however appealing in abstract, however necessary in moderation, is no guarantee of self-identity, of security, of autonomy itself. It will always be an insufficient motivator for people to create better lives, because it inevitably demands the subordination of identity and freedom to a mass for whom there is no guarantee that they care at all about your welfare. Social democracy is Western capitalism, properly leavened by the regulation whose prototype was instituted by American liberalism. Socialism is a cataclysm; it is everything neoliberalism is said to be but made visible - it is the bartering of economic security in exchange for the surrender of freedom. It was a cataclysm a hundred years ago, it's a cataclysm now, and it will be a cataclysm a hundred years from now, but it will always be with us, and we will never stop fighting against it.<br /><br />No matter what Jacobin intersectionalists say to discredit it, no matter what FOX News conservatives say to discredit it, no matter how many times Bill Clinton-like moderates acceded to conservative demands to dismantle it, no matter how effectively the alt-right will assault it in the future, there is only one way to live your best self, &nbsp;and that is self-creation, and at least at this moment in time, America, wounded as she clearly is, is still the best place to do it.<br /><br />To anyone willing to read the history and statistics, it should be obvious that American Liberalism has achieved more in less time than any nation in the history of the world. Let's just take one obvious example: since fifty years ago, poverty has fallen by one-sixth it's level, since sixty-five years ago, poverty has fallen by nearly 40%. Imagine what might have happened had conservatives not cut and demonized Lyndon Johnson's Great Society programs. We did not end poverty, we didn't even come close, but we lifted fifty million people out of it whose ancestors never knew anything but poverty, and we lifted their children, and their grandchildren, and soon, let us pray, their great-granchildren. How many hundreds of millions are now more secure for what the United States government accomplished with the Great Society programs?<br /><br />This is just one of a hundred areas where America's achievements defy description. And yet, why are we all so hopeless? Why is it that the America of 1966, segregated and rioting, perpetually terrified of nuclear armageddon, wading into the mud and shit of the first war America would ever unquestionably lose, was so much more hopeful than we are today?&nbsp;Time and time again, postwar America achieved great and unprecedented things; but rather than fortify us and give us confidence for the next challenges, they exhausted us and depleted us of the ability to keep meeting them. Every hope that America would become a better place to live in these fifty years was born out, and yet every hope seemed to die. We have achieved the better new world for which many of our grandparents fought in all sorts of ways - not just through war thank god, and some of our parents too, but not only did it turn out not that great, it also turned out that that this better world might die very soon. In 1966, we were secure that the future would be better. In 2016, America is better, and the world probably is too, but we are anything but secure.&nbsp;</div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: small;"><br /></div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: small;">It is impossible to look at Art and not perceive in it in some way in which it tells the story of the area and era in which it was conceived, and it's furthermore impossible, much as aesthetes like Vladimir Nabokov would disagree, to look at Art without reading parallels into it from the real world - or from our own lives, or from the lives of people we know and love or hate or to whom we're ambivalent, or parallels from the metaphysical cosmos at large and those basic, microcosmic but still deep truths of what life and existence is.<br /><br />One of Art's great secrets is its societal tremors, Art is a societal seizmograph. With obvious exceptions of course, a secure era always seems to be dominated by secure Art in which the rules are as clearly defined as are the rules of the society at large. The vast majority of the 18th century, with its intricate and unbreakable monarchical hierarchies, was the archetype of a society in which art was created with extremely distinct rules so as to not upset the precarious balance of an incredibly intricate societal structure. Just about all official European and American buildings seemed to be designed with the kind of columns one finds in Ancient Greece or Rome, and the fact that they imitated a pagan era rather than a Christian one was not an accident. The heights and lengths of the buildings were determined by mathematical ratios found in nature so as to provide the most harmonious possible surroundings. Nearly all pictorial art was designed by schematic before the schematic was painted over. Just about all music ended in the same key in which it began, and the phrase-lengths are almost inevitably kept in multiples of four measures. The poetry was almost inevitably kept in strictest possible couplet form. The expectations of what art was supposed to be was ironclad because the expectations of society itself was ironclad - it was the age after Newton but before Darwin. For a learned aristocrat of the period, nature was, as Eric Hoffer might put it, as orderly and harmonious as a perfectly set and wound Swiss grandfather clock. To put it somewhat differently, the earth may have been displaced from the center of the universe, but along with the Earth's displacement was moved the Church, not the State. For century after century, the State had to orbit around the Church, but the Church was now a secondary body, gravitationally drawn to into the forceful web of State - which could weave a society with far greater intricacy than the Church ever could on its most organized day. When controlled by the Church, what does it matter if peasants are kept in squalor? Blessed are the poor, and the greater the degradation, the greater their reward will be in the world to come. But as horrible as it might seem to our 21st century ears, a nobleman has to look after his property, which is a reflection of his character. If peasants and livestock and land and infrastructure was kept in disarray, it would reflect horribly on the people who ran it. That is not to say that abuses that would horrify is would not be perpetrated every day in every region, it's not to say that abuses that would even horrify people at the time were not committed all the time by noblemen who did not care much how they were viewed by others - just think of Mozart's Don Giovanni. But there was a marked improvement, and because there was a marked improvement, there was also a correponding demand for still greater. More on that in a moment.<br /><br />The point is that while there was evidence which displaced the Earth as the central stationary body around which the universal spheres revolved, there was no hard evidence yet that the Sun was not at the center - as Copernicus would have it. And like the Sun, the central body of the universe which gives light and warmth and protection and vision, the monarchy was the light of the world around which all society revolved as a reflection of the Sun/King's glory. Life was a harmoniously regimented hierarchy in which every person knew his place in the social structure, and should be eternally satisfied with it.<br /><br />But as anyone who grew up in the suburbs can tell you, hierarchy and predictability can at times feel, however well-managed, like a prison, and when the prison walls come down, the chaos is that much more explosive because nobody remembers what chaos feels like.<br /><br />By 1789, France, the kingdom well-known for having the most intricate of all Europe's monarchical hierarchies, was beset by a revolution. First came a financial crisis, then collapse, then the rise of the Jacobins and the guillotine, then the execution of a few hundred noblemen, then the rise of Robespierre who executed most of the other Jacobins and eventually was himself executed for having been responsible for the execution of 20,000 Frenchmen, then came the ten year French Revolutionary War which killed somewhere between 300,000 and 1.1 million French, and then came Napoleon to unite France under his dictatorship and who decided he needed to put the rest of Europe under an Empire united under his rule, and somewhere between 3.5 and 6 million people died for the cause of his ambition to conquer the world. When there is too much order, the ensuing chaos become all the worse. Too much control yields to the demand for too little, which once enacted, yields to the ultimate controller - death. The years 1789 to 1815 were an avalanche of death that claimed ever more lives for twenty-six years before the avalanche finally stopped rumbling.<br /><br />War did not rage throughout the supposedly civilized part of the world for another hundred years, when it broke out again in 1914, it took thirty-one years to stop, and in the meantime, if we go by the estimates of R. J. Rummel, probably the best known scholar of state murder, who also has an easily accessible website if you can stomach such a thing, we lost somewhere between 17 and 18 million to World War One, then somewhere between 20 to 50 million in the Spanish Influenza which broke out because of the unsanitariness of the battlefields - it spread so far around the globe that the world will never get a true estimate of the lives lost, an estimated seven million who starved to death in various countries during the Great Depression, another estimated 5 to 9 million deaths due to the Russian Civil War of the early 1920s which broke out after the collapse of the Czar, only some of which are attributed the four million deaths for which Lenin is directly responsible after he consolidated power, and the 5 million killed by Imperial Japan, most of which are part of the 20 million dead in the Chinese Civil War of the 30s and 40s, for which the Communist party led by Mao in the few years before he assumed power was responsible for 4 million deaths alone, then there are the four million Chinese Deaths for which Chiang-Kai Shek's right-wing nationalist government was responsible, then there is the Armenian Genocide perpetrated by Turkish generals which killed roughly 1.8 million if one counts a few hundred thousand non-Armenians also murdered, and then the nearly million people killed by the allegedly great Ataturk who is still revered by American neoconservatives - taking their cue from Bernard Lewis - as the model of an incorruptible secularizing dictator, the well over a million killed in quote-unquote minor European right-wing dictatorships like Mussolini and Franco and Horthy and Pilsudski and Salazar and Petain, another roughly 20 million killed in various ways by Hitler's Nazis for which we needn't elaborate, and the probable upward of 50 million people killed by Stalin's various orders and policies alone. It is macabre at best to list these totals and then add all of them up, but let's just say that the wars of the early twentieth century killed so far over a hundred million people that it might be closer to two-hundred million. One then adds up the stupefying death tolls of the Cold War and the quote unquote Third World upon whom it was mostly perpetrated, the roughly twelve million Soviets for which dictators after Stalin were responsible, the 2 million dead in the killing fields of Pol-Pot's Cambodia, the roughly 1.7 million killed by North Korea, another 1.7 million killed in the Vietnam War and its aftermath, the 1.5 million dead in the Polish Civil War which killed my great-aunt after surviving the Holocaust, the 1.5 million killed by the various Pakistani military dictatorships, the 1.1 million killed in Yugoslavia, yes, the 6 million dead from United States actions in the Cold War. And worst of all, the roughly seventy-seven million killed in Mao's China, for which no truly reliable total is possible, and some estimates go up to a hundred twenty million people. While estimates are obviously unreliable, evidence would seem to point to that five hundred years of traditional Western mercantile Imperialism with all its attendant mass murders and starvations and diseases and slaveries cannot come even remotely close to equalling the total number of deaths engendered by thirty-one years of advanced warfare, let alone an entire global century of it. In fact, for five hundred years of Western Imperialism to reach anything even resembling the equivalent death tolls of the twentieth century one would have to not only accept the very highest estimates - such as putting the total Native Americans killed at 120 million people higher than than the 15 million that is generally supposed, but also include the casualties of Islamic Imperialism. God forgive me if I'm wrong, because I know no one else will, and they might not even if I'm right. I do not want to imply or even give the semblance of implication that imperialism is anything but one of the villains of modern history - but I do believe that imperialism may be the tertiary villain that to which totalitarianism and nationalism must take precedence. All three are obviously bound up with one another, but totalitarianism in the name of anti-imperialism has been proven again and again to provoke far greater suffering and lethal consequence than imperialism in the name of anti-totalitarianism. It may even be the quaternary villain of modern history, with militarism playing a still larger role. I know that it will inevitably sound to people as though I'm making allowances for the practices of imperialism, be it in historic mercantile form or in contemporary unregulated capitalist form, to continue. I'm even slightly doubtful about the statistics and continually worry that I've misread them, every time I've read them they've surprised the hell out me. I know that any complaint I make about the Left's wail of imperialism uber alles will sound like a defense of imperialism...<br /><br />While a few people of direct descent from Survivors of Hitler or Stalin or Mao, or veterans of the world's bloodiest wars, become extraordinarily committed social justice warriors, perhaps the most committed of them all for the knowledge they see so close at hand, I find that the blood-curdling stories of the Twentieth Century at its worst makes it difficult to work oneself into sufficient commitment to fighting for every person suffering under injustice. In my experience, in the experience of most Jewish-Americans I've met, most Soviet-Americans, perhaps even most Chinese-Americans though I don't have the right to speak for them nearly as well, all three of for whom privilege is still a relatively unfamiliar concept that we're viscerally terrified to lose in spite of our newfound privilege because many members who experienced the very worst of the twentieth century still live, have similar difficulties. We know just how much more unjust and cursed the world can become than it currently is, all we had to do was see the haunted look in our grandparents' eyes. We are extremely mistrustful of militants, of the right and left, who would send us hurtling closer toward its potential. And if the neoimperial injustices of unregulated vulture capitalism add up and the financial system completely collapses sometime around 2040 and sends the world spinning into a Third World War, and perhaps then an even worse Fourth World War thereafter, would it be that unreasonable to assume that the next world war would claim yet another multiple of ten - more a billion lives as its eternal property? Would it be unreasonable to assume that the aftereffects of dictatorship and illness and proxy war and yes, imperial wage slavery, from the conditions it leaves could claim another two billion? Or is that underestimating the number of possible casualties?<br /><br />If I'm being harder on the Left than I'm being on the Right, it's because I assume that it's mostly people of the Left who will listen to this podcast, as they do to podcasts generally. Educated people in our day and age generally tilt to varying degrees of Left, and the problems of the Right in American life are so unbelievably present and fecund that they need very little enumeration from me. Dominance by the American Right is a simple fact of modern American life, and the nearly the only questions about it are under the rubric of how to defeat it.<br /><br />The single greatest justification to say that imperialism is a boil that must be lanced to eradication, even with all its attendent evils, is the near-apocalyptic events which such wealth inequality almost inevitably seems to foretell. But the problem is that theft and exploitation and plunder of one civilization to the detriment of another - which as Modern China's conduct in Africa proves, is hardly only a Western problem - has not only never been eradicated, but is so complex that the marginal attempts that history has yet made have resulted in their own attendant disasters. Not only were Stalin and Mao still more prolific artists of death than Hitler, but so second rank dictators of the quote-unquote Third World were still more bloody in their statistics than their right-wing nationalist counterparts. To take a few obviously selective examples: no amount of Mussolini blood in Ethiopia could spill a tenth of the blood spilled by Mengistu, no amount of French and American greed or incompetence or delusion could unleash on Cambodia what Pol Pot did. No amount of Chinese nationalism could spill blood with the joyful alacrity of Mao. Right wing dictatorship is not quite as bloody, for the simple reason that the innate predisposition of right-wing pathology with its veneration for institutions and tradition is a predisposition to authoritarianism and violent law enforcement. &nbsp;Dictatorship does not do as much to upset the natural right-wing order of things because conservatives already respond with veneration to authority. On the other hand, the Left, with its pathological predisposition toward upending tradition and institutions, has a natural predisposition to chaos and terror. Generally speaking, a right-wing dictatorship tries upholds the law by the most extreme of measures, while a left-wing dictatorship, as happened most obviously under Mao and Stalin, and perhaps to even a very small extent under Hitler's National Socialism - remember that Hitler was still as much a socialist as a nationalist, will always break the law, change the law, subvert the law, to make even and perhaps especially its most loyal citizens live under the profoundest terror. The best way to do it is to kill their neighbors, kill their friends, kill their families, and finally kill them.<br /><br />All this is to give you the proper context to talk about Seinfeld....<br /><br />An insecure era will be dominated by insecure art. Let's just speak about painting for a moment. Over what we generally call the long 19th century, starting with the French Revolution's hopeful enactment and stretching until World War I's senseless beginning in 1914, the art of the continent became more and more insecure, less and less dominated by rules. The visual art went from David and Canelleto's almost geometric naturalism to washes of color from Delacroix and Turner and the grotesque caricatures of Goya and Blake. The washes of color eventually became the impressionism of Monet and Cezanne. The grotesqueries eventually became the expressionism of Munch and Georg Grosz. It was no longer agreed as it was since Classical Greece that the purpose of art is to render life and nature as it is. For many artists, the purpose of art became art itself, its various colors and shapes. For others, the purpose of art was to disturb life and distort nature, not to conjure scientific images in the mind of shapes and colors, but to conjure poetic images with distortions that one can only see on one's own in dreams. Fairly soon thereafter, the two poles merged back into each other, and impressionist and expressionist art and its attendent movements seemed roughly interchangeable - one could argue that such a development was already present in Van Gogh. There was, and remains, much great art produced in the 20th and 21st centuries, but without an agreed upon basis, there are fewer artists in whose work people seem to trace the spirit of an era, a place, a condition - and if there is, then all too few people know about it. Traditional art as Europeans defined it since the dawn of history had broken apart, and will most likely never be put back together.<br /><div><br /></div>One could trace the development of classical music, of poetry, of fiction, through similar permutations. But what was clear in each was that by 1914, the foundations and structures in which each artform was traditionally thought to be built upon were completely shattered, few people care about it anymore, and very few artists have found a way to make other people care about what we do. Most of us who operate in the traditional arts in our day are, for better or worse, radical in ways that are entirely conventional, and generally reject the wider world with its capitalist compromises because capitalism allows us the luxury of radical worldviews - in spite of our supposed subversion, we artists are still educated enough make a lower-middle-class income - through the arts or otherwise, which is just barely low enough to convince some people that we're truly impoverished, and therefore have justification to speak for the plights of the peoples whom capitalism has truly helped to marginalize rather than us, people whose plights we understand not at all from the inside.<br /><br />Traditional religion has been thrown out in the first world, a development probably for the better, but metaphysics has been thrown out with it. The goal of many, perhaps even the majority of artists today, is to improve the world through one's art - wouldn't it be better then to pick up a tool box and build houses for the homeless? As much as we'd like to will it otherwise, is no such thing as art that improves the world - there is only art that makes the world a more pleasing place to live - and while there's surely no little consolation in that, art often makes the world a more pleasing place for risible people who do not deserve to be pleased. The most powerful thing art can do is precisely the opposite, art allows for the possibility that there may be other worlds, alternate realities, transcendent dimensions, which are more meaningful than this rather banal one where our hard work and suffering goes so unrewarded. Perhaps the very greatest of all the arts and artists are the ones who can take the very stuff of boring, banal, everyday life, and transform it into something luminously meaningful - if I were to provide a partial and idiosyncratic list - it would have to include painters like Rembrandt and Courbet at their least self-consciously meaningful, Leonardo drawing science in his diaries and Goya turning the impoverished and insane into dark mythology in his home, Tolstoy giving the natural pace and pulse of an entire civilization in his two novels so enormous they're no longer novels, and his artistic son Chekhov giving us the condensed version of life from his short stories and plays, life exactly as it is for one intimate commingling of the little and disappointed people we all are who have to live one day at a time, untold novelists whom our generation with our love for the substitute metaphysics of fantasy and sci fi no longer has time for but who throw our own lives back to us bathed in meaning - well-known ones most have still heard of like Jane Austen giving us middle class love and George Elliot giving us middle class disappointment, Joseph Conrad giving us political despair and Willa Cather giving us American struggle, Balzac giving us Paris and Saul Bellow giving us Chicago, VS Naipaul giving us the grim realities of imperial life and Vasily Grossman giving us the still grimmer ones of life in a totalitarian regime. Jean Renoir giving us frenetic movies that tell us the truth about love, Yasijiro Ozu giving us stationary movies that tell us the truth about family. Robert Altman giving us the the full spectrum of America, Vittorio De Sica giving us the full spectrum of poverty, and Pedro Almodovar giving us the full spectrum of LGBTQ life. Mozart giving us the problems of life in every social class and station and gender in his operas, Beethoven giving us every snippet of musical style he ever heard as a stream of consciousness in his late Sonatas and Quartets and the Ninth Symphony, Mahler embracing the whole world in so many of the Symphonies and Schumann the microscopic quirks of so many different people in his character pieces on the piano. Shakespeare giving us historical figures all through his career, transformed so that they live again more vividly than whomever they were in real life ever did, and mingling as they often do with the lower class characters who keep them honest. Chaucer's Canterbury Tales giving us the full gamut of perspectives from the Middle Ages. Montaigne insisting that he, and therefore we, are a subject more worth investigating than any supernatural force. Cervantes making reality brutally intrude on a dreamer like Don Quixote who desperately wants life to be something other than it is. And perhaps best of all, to me at least, the Old Testament, a book not about nobles as in Shakespeare or war heroes as in Homer, but outcasts, misfits, weirdos, people who struggle for transcendence not because they're perfect, but because they're deeply, deeply flawed, and no one so much as the Divine himself. No matter what the time period or the artform, what we're seeing is real life, domestic life, bourgeois and dull, reality transformed to give our lives the meaning and dignity which our inner experience never seems to have when we're living it. Experiencing work like this does not make us better people - would we even know how to measure that? Experiencing these works simply gives us the inspiration to keep going - if a dimension that is not ours yet so like our own can seem so meaningful, then maybe there is value and meaning in life that is not apparent in the real thing.<br /><br />But, of course, what a pretentious list of highbrow art - it's the kind of list a 19th century aristocrat would make in fear that if he didn't have these works on the tip of his tongue, somebody might think he's stupid. Do movies even, or ci-ne-ma, belong in a list so pretentious? Who knows? But alongside this art, what can't be denied is that in America, a new art, a popular art for a less aristocratic consumer, took flight. A nascent art, still in 2016 just barely out of its infancy. Neither an aristocratic art made by servants to an aristocratic class, nor a folk art made by anonymous artisans and developed anonymously in an oral tradition over thousands of years. A popular art, an art of the people, by the people, and for the people, with few more creators that will be distinguished yet among posterity than there are in today's traditional arts. And yet, the possibilities it holds for the next few thousand years are at least as infinite as the possibilities were at the dawn of Western Civilization. Art, thank God, is not longer Western Art. if the internet has proven anything, it's that a Western Art is now a global art where anyone, anywhere can create greatness. And if a three-minute, four-chord, pop song, with a verse, a chorus, and a bridge, can yield material as good as Let It Be and The Times They Are a-Changin', let alone Fight the Power or The Message; or a hundred minute studio movie yield Citizen Kane or Rear Window, let alone The Godfather or Nashville, or a fifty page comic book yield Batman and X-Men, let alone Watchmen or Maus; or a commercialized TV schedule yield Seinfeld and The Simpsons, let alone The Sopranos or Mad Men, how much more is yet possible to extract from these rather flimsy and constricted cultural forms whose limitations are derived from the economic necessities of mass production, but created from material that are a literal reset button from the arts as they've been practiced for three thousand years?<br /><br />America was able to yield such a secure art in the 20th century, housing a relatively surprising number of bright lights within its extraordinarily severe contours, because it was inexperienced in the ways of the world. American exceptionalism is a pernicious lie, and yet, America is an historical exception. Until the inception of the American republic, the idea of a successful republic flew in the face of history's entirety. It was a concept the world basically abandoned two-thousand years previously because it was thought so unfeasible. It was, as the great internet presence Piero Scaruffi put it on his indispensible website: a Copernican Revolution in political thinking - have we really reached the point as a society that people need to be reminded of that?<br /><br />Perhaps uniquely in the history of the world, the great belief in the American way of life is the absence of belief. America has not forced the majority of its sphere of influence to convert to its religions by the sword, it has taken immigrants of every variety, and it has offered enormous incentives for many other countries to adopt liberal democracy - in which the only limitation for the pursuit of your freedom is economic. No one in their right mind can say that America practices the theory it preaches particularly well, but the theory itself of a country like this is revolutionary, as is even the middling success with which we've applied it. When America has strayed from its path, and strayed it most certainly has, it is to the models of older civilizations who simply install a proxy ruler in their stead who crushes anyone who will not serve their best interests, or of ancient empires built and sustained by slavery - slavery both through deed and through wage. These are traits clearly embedded in the American story and character, but they are in no way uniquely American, and in some ways are far less prevalent in American history than of any giant which ever bestrode the world stage before us. Even in neoconservatism, surely one of the more noxious forces in American life, perhaps even of world life, can neoconservatism really be read as anything but a movement that makes such a religious fundamentalism out of freedom that they want to evangelize it to the entire world? And however fervently neoconservatives believe in American freedom, it's just a small pebble of the fervid lake of fire which American liberty inspired to literally billions worldwide in the 20th century, all of which happened in spite of the fact that most Americans have no real sense or interest in any part of the world that is not in America!<br /><br />Nevertheless, in 2016, how can anyone doubt that America is a sinful nation like any other nation that's ever provided order out of the chaos of the world, with an extra sin from many former world powers because of the overwhelming hypocrisy of America's actions in relation to its ideals. With the election of this new President, it may stand to reason that the fibres which gradually improved this hypocritical republic from generation to generation have broken completely, and will not only stay broken for the duration of our lifetimes, but that America's nerves will heal without fibres, and atrophy from generation to generation back to exactly the flimsy standards of freedom we upheld at our country's founding. However badly America has failed, and there's no sense denying that we've failed disastrously - our African American population, the Latin American countries in our sphere of influence, and as was made so clear in the last election, in taking up the banner of women's rights as human rights.<br /><br />But it's beginning to be arguable that one other nation has since taken the American model and improved upon it. The greatest compliment to the America experiment is that perhaps the greatest, most sustainable improvement yet made upon the American first draft of a freer world is probably modern Germany, a nation America once subdued with overwhelming force.<br /><br />What we did was pretty casual compared to what the Soviets did; and for fear of losing whatever audience hasn't turned things off in disgust yet, I'll spare you the details. But the way which America suffered through World War II was absolutely nothing compared to Soviet suffering, roughly one in every two-hundred ninety-five Americans died in World War Two. One in six Soviets died - if you want a small sense of the Soviet experience, read Vasily Grossman's epic novel, Life and Fate, which was written as a kind of World War Two equivalent to Tolstoy's War and Peace - and was banned until the mid-80's. It is in many ways as great as the Tolstoy original, but its as disorienting as Tolstoy is secure. In Tolstoy, even the deaths of characters are noble and meaningful and uplifting, but in Grossman, the deaths are utterly senseless. We have so little experience of the Pity of War in America that you begin to wonder if we're well overdue for an experience like this.<br /><br />The greatest benefactor from the totalitarianisms of the twentieth century was America. These incredibly stupid sacrifices that Stalin and Mao and Hitler imposed on their populations did an fought amount to improve their countries, they only served to improve the open societies against which they fight. And because of that, to think of World War II as in nearly any sense our war which we won, is an insult to Russia, and just barely less an insult to Germany, and an insult to China. They bled for our prosperity, and anyone who lived under the Soviet Union, the real victors of World War II, will never forgive us for benefiting so much from their sacrifice. But experiences like World War II just go to show how senseless and stupid war is, and yet how inevitable. As John Updike might say, war is the dark obverse of sex. It's the two irrational behaviors of humankind which you'll never eradicate, one seems as glorious as the other seems horrific, but both spring from the dark well of subhuman urges that go back billions of years which are inconveniently present in us all, and will no doubt survive us to glom onto the next evolutionary step.<br /><br />In terms of history as it happens, the 20th century was not the American Century. The 20th Century was the German Century. Germany, and particularly Berlin, was the center of gravity, it was the front and nexus around which hot and cold wars were fought. From the very beginning of World War One until the fall of the Berlin Wall, the center of the story is 'what's going on in Berlin?' If any century is the American Century, it's probably this one. Did you really expect it was going to be fun? As odd and disorienting as it is to conceive, we were just a side player in the twentieth century, our cavalry came to the rescue at convenient moments while, in the periphery, our infantry stomped our cleats on the faces of others. Otherwise, we just minded our corner store and reaped all the benefits of our competitors getting conveniently looted. In 1948, America, producing well over half the world's GDP, cut the Europeans a check for 12 billion dollars, which is worth roughly ten times that amount today, and even in real terms, 120 billion dollars would go many times further in 1948 in the best parts of America, let alone in the bombed out economy of Western Europe for which governments had depleted savings and depleted agricultural production, the latter of which guaranteed a starving population. This was The Marshall Plan, and it was America's finest hour on the world stage, which allowed half a continent to spring back to life. It is a testament to an inconvenient truth of the Obama era, which is that sometimes, intervention in other countries is not only warranted, but necessary for the security of the world - an inconvenient truth to which it now seems Obama should have paid much greater heed to Mitt Romney's warnings in 2012 about Russia. The world is much too large, and moves much too quickly, to ever hold principles to which one clings through it all. All that matters is the necessity of the moment, and so long as you exist in the world, you will be called upon to do things that challenge the sanctity of your values every day.<br /><br />Who knows how savagely we Americans would behave if one in every six people died in our war rather than one in every two-hundred ninety five? But because America treated Germany so much better than the Soviet Union did, Germany coveted the American model.<br /><br />Just seventy-five years ago Germany was the most totalitarian nation on Earth, and yet today it can at times seem like the world's most thriving multicultural democracy. Germany is still lower than America in GDP per-capita, but Gross Domestic Product per capita is deceiving. So many of the south-eastern Arab nations, Saudi Arabia, Brunei, the United Arab Emirates, number among the highest per-capita GDP's in the world, the reason being that wealth is concentrated in the hundreds of billions within a few royal families, while the majority of the population works for slave wages - "if that" in some cases. Other Northern European countries like Norway, Switzerland, Luxembourg, and Ireland, also have higher per-capita GDP's than Germany, but they are, at this point, much more racially homogenous. Would they be so willing to share their wealth if their neighbors didn't remind them so much of themselves? Furthermore, more than half of European nations, including Germany, have a higher per-capita debt than even the United States. Only Norway, among first-world nations, is debt free - when you adjust per person, Sweden's debt is more than twice America's, Switzerland's debt is more than three times that of America's, Luxembourg's per-capita debt is roughly sixty times that of America's. Income in Norway is abetted by enormous amounts of oil, while non EU countries like Switzerland and Luxembourg are to a large extent closed off to anyone who was not descended from their countries for hundreds of years. At the moment, and I still hold out massive hope for India, Germany is the rising nation that seems to have taken the model of liberal democracy, multicultural, capitalist but very strictly regulated, and improved upon it. The American system is clearly declining, but Germany seems as though it will rise as it should have a hundred years ago, not as a military police state, but as a tolerant and educated mutlticultural democracy. The cheap education it provides its citizens will prevent them from being too ignorant, the comparitively massive subsidies with which Germany maintains in its cultural history - which particularly in music is one of the very greatest glories of the world - will prevent them from forgetting the lessons of history, the public subsidies with which they provide for infrastructure and building maintenance is<br /><br />Germany has taken in roughly 140,000 refugees, and it's also worth noting to the people who claim that Germany is being too cavalier with its offers of asylum that Germany has turned down twice as many applications as its accepted. It is being strenuously thorough in its examinations of potential residents as any country has to be - and no doubt, a few radical Muslims have made their way through, and a few among the few could perpetrate terror attacks. But the price of not letting them in is much, much greater. A once great civilization burrowed ever deeper into the most fundamentalist precepts of its religion because its oxygen was cut off from the wellspring of modern life. Christian Europe's intolerance helped turn Islam into a force that was by-and-large antimodern, and it now has the chance to begin righting a wrong that was perpetrated over the course of a millennium. Europe, and particularly Germany, seems fated to an opportunity for redemption, in which it can facilitate the transition to greater freedoms for poorer parts of the world that America has now clearly failed to do.<br /><br />For the first time ever in the modern era, mass amounts of immigrants in search of greater freedom are not knocking at the doors of America, they're knocking at the doors of Europe, the very continent which ancestors were most desperate to leave, the conqueror of so many billions and the continent from which so many hundreds of millions fled for reasons that turned out to be all too prescient. While America seems to be burrowing ever more deeply into its historic pathologies, Germany is setting the blueprint of a democracy in which, in the modern era, Christianity and Islam may have the first chance of existing together in peaceful cooperation. And even if the coexistence is not peaceful, the sheer number and percentage of Muslim immigrants is so far less than are generally presupposed that the claims of Europe being overrun with Islam have to be considered a mite loopy.<br /><br />My saintly but conservative mother thinks I could not be more wrong about this, and thinks Germany's welcoming of immigrants is setting it on a crash course with disaster. We'll see which, if either of us, is correct. The truth is that we have no idea how well or badly the new influx of refugees will change Germany, and given the demographic shifts in Germany, it's worth knowing that it could at times to go awry to a small extent - resulting not only in minor erosions of freedoms the majority white population to accommodate a religion that like all religions demands the subjugation of women, but much more likely, can result in the erosion of freedom for Muslims themselves in a nation to which they came to pursue a freer life. There may very well be more Islamic terrorist attacks in the European future, but I guarantee that Europe's Islamic population will suffer immeasurably worse at the hands of terrorists. Not only will most of these supposed terror attacks be against these immigrant apostates, but the retribution of Whites and the State will be immeasurably more draconian than what nearly any Islamic terrorist can do. With everything that happens in Europe today, as it does in America, the possibility of religious identification and religious detention is omnipresent. The only way to sugarcoat it is to call it 'religious detention' rather than its true term 'internment or concentration camps.' And for the rest of our lifetimes, there will always be a dark glimmer of still worse possibilities on the horizon.<br /><br />Civilizations who have achieved greatly, be they American, or British, or French, or Chinese, or Singaporean, or Hong Kongian, or Indian, or South African, or Australian, or Italian, or Spanish, or Dutch, or Turkish, or Baltic, or Russian, or even and perhaps especially Israeli, are built to be sabotaged, and probably built to eventually be destroyed. Once you have improved a civilization to the point that people can live in it securely, it is much easier to create dents in the structure than to build it still further - and just to take the obvious everyday example, what is trolling but intellectual terrorism? Like physical terrorism, trolling erodes ever so gradually at our sense of safety, and the sense that our freedoms are guaranteed. We become more circumspect in what we say, and more imprisoned in our own minds and worries. Still more outrageously, whether the offenders are terrorists or trolls, they will inevitably claim that they are doing so in the name of the greater good - most of them probably believe what they say.<br /><br />Civilizations are built to be destroyed, the world does not become something different than it is, it simply is what it is. Our civilization may live another day, it may live a great and grand series of greater and more days, but if American civilization is marked for doom, then Seinfeld is what will mark it to posterity. Tune in next time for the headiest explanation of Seinfled you'll ever hear.<br /><br /><br /></div>Evan Tuckerhttps://plus.google.com/101333496816879280258noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5120202207964289878.post-27073239052545273642016-11-22T00:12:00.001-05:002016-11-29T17:14:20.316-05:00Review Dump 3<b><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DrhsSYhuoUQ&amp;t=52s">Mahler Symphony no. 6:</a> Alsop/BSO - November 12th </b>It's taken ten years, but I think I've finally figured out Marin Alsop. Her true artistic forbearer as a conductor is not Leonard Bernstein - she isn't bold or imaginative enough to be anything like the teacher whose connection she plays up for all the PR it's worth. Her true ancestor is Andre Previn - she loves big tunes, she loves it loud, she can convey enormous excitement, but profundity is not her thing. With the exception of Das Lied von der Erde, I've never come away from one of the sacred cow megaliths of the repertoire convinced that she has its full measure. The most telling moment of this performance was an audience reaction when the hammerblow sounded - I saw a college-age looking kid whisper to his friend "Fuck Yeah!" The first three movements were truly loud, but I had to agree with Charles Downey rather than Tim Smith that this was a performance that stayed wide of Mahler's mark. Still, it was better than Semyon Bychkov's snoozer Mahler 6 with the New York Philharmonic back in January - let's see if he does any better with the Concertgebouw in Mahler 5 in DC. The performance was only truly impressive in the finale - which is so mammoth that if played well can banish memories of mediocrity in the rest of the piece. Alsop seemed to view it as a virtuoso concerto for orchestra, none of Simon Rattle's extraordinary tragic daemonism, but it was still extremely impressive in its way. I don't think Alsop would know how to convey real catharsis or pathos, she doesn't have much in her toolbox in the way of refinement, but she does know how to make a truly impressive noise. She's of course at her most impressive in American repertoire (no shame in that), and truly fantastic at creating concerts that are enormous events. The best performances of hers' I've seen in core repertoire over the years are in those gigantic megaliths full of flash and fury that skirt the line between depth and vulgarity - Mahler 2, Mahler 3, Alpensinfonie, Shostakovich 7. In all of the above, she most certainly landed on the vulgarity sound and made some truly glorious noises, but I'd hardly call any of those performances particularly insightful. When she does anything earlier than Mahler that requires a smaller orchestra, I usually stay away.<br /><div><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d9stck0qnCc&amp;t=1331s"><br /></a></div><div><b><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d9stck0qnCc&amp;t=1331s">Anne of the Thousand Days</a>: Chesapeake Theater - November 13th </b>With all the troubles and dread we have, we all need our emotions purged through catharsis. I expected catharsis from Mahler 6 and got no such thing. Instead I got catharsis from a faux-Shakespeare costume drama by a mid-20th century American playwright who shared with me the great fortune of a superb cast and director who played on his text and my fears like a violin. Henry VIII's England was a society that got exactly what it deserved - a society that put pleasure and personal fulfillment above all, and none moreso than the personal fulfillment of the King. It was personal fulfillment taken to the most logical extension - openly risking a century and a half of war as a demonstration of the King's love for a conquest who gives her body but not her heart. Like all the world's bloody conflicts - particularly the bloodiest, it was all so easily avoidable were the priorities of societies who provoked them not utterly wrongheaded. It was as though we were watching a prosperous, peaceful society unwind past the point of no return, precisely because they were convinced they would live forever. We watched as famous historical figure after figure seemed to perform mental contortions that turned their rationality to logical gibberish. Here is the stuff which the bloodiest wars - be it the English Civil War or the Wars of the Roses or the Thirty Years War or The World War (if you see the two as one long conflict) - are always made of. This production was so utterly superior in every way to their Othello, let alone the abysmal Titus Andronicus I saw around this time last year. Maybe they should stick to faux-Shakespeare rather than the real thing.<br /><br /><b><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tjRPLfZmao0">North by Northwest</a>: Senator Theater - November 16th </b>It is impossible to watch any work of art today without relating it to the 'situation' in which we find ourselves. I could construct a whole paragraph around how totalitarian societies operate by stripping us of our identity, but our inner resourcefulness can be what saves us... I could probably also relate it to Kafka and say that North by Northwest is Kafka if the Bugmaster from Prague were trying to have fun. Perhaps all that gives Hitchcock too much credit - even if the movie is easily one of the greatest ever put to celluloid, it basically seems like an excuse for a collection of cinematic setpieces which Hitch needs an excuse to throw together. I have no idea if there's any substance whatsoever to North by Northwest, and I don't care. The best thing I suppose I can say is that the title comes from Hamlet, and the full quote is "I am mad north-north-west. When the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a handsaw." If there's a larger point, the point is that Cary Grant is the only sane person in the picture, and seems insane because what happens to him is so insane. I prefer North by Northwest to Vertigo and probably to Psycho too, though not to Rear Window - Vertigo is so grim and almost humorless, Psycho is obviously too macabre to love, but no amount of suspense in North by Northwest, or Rear Window, gets in the way of the fun. Which brings us to...<br /><b><br /></b><b><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5chGqVyaq-0">Hamlet</a>: English National Theater Simulcast - November 20th 11AM </b>I'm beginning to make good on my resolve to go to more of those theater and opera simulcasts in which the audience consists of me and two dozen old Jewish ladies. I had trouble sleeping the night before, and I slept through most of the first two acts and seem to have woken up right after the 'To Be or Not To Be' soliloquy, just in time for 'Get Thee to a Nunnery.' The last three acts of it were... thoroughly decent, if not better. Benedict Cumberbatch is clearly a capable actor, but I doubt I'll ever number among the cult which surrounds him, which I would imagine is thinking with organs lower than the brain or even the heart. He was a thoroughly intelligent Hamlet who spoke the speeches trippingly on the tongue as though Shakespearean verse were as natural conversation, but emotionally, he was stuck on one note, replacing real emotional nuance with a sort of adolescent whimpering. The real problem was not Cumberbatch, I would imagine the director was directing him to be more emotional even though literature's great narcissist needn't be emotional at all. Bad directorial choices were present all through this production, bad music, soliloquies done with a spotlight and the rest of the stage on freezeframe, imitations of cinematic slow motion, a set that looked borrowed from a door-slamming farce. There was, however, one truly brilliant directorial choice that practically made up for all the egregious ones. Act V, done after intermission, was rendered in an Elsinore already bombed out by Fortinbras. The revolution that Laertes nearly raises against Claudius makes much more sense. This is an interpolation from the text so brilliant that you wonder why you haven't seen it in any production before, or in every production. There are two main characters in Hamlet: Hamlet and Elsinore. Elsinore is a giant, creaking, antique machine on the verge of collapse which only needs a wind from North by Northwest (which is in fact Norway's position to it) to blow it over - or a fencing match gone awry, and Hamlet is its abstract and brief chronicler.<br /><b><br /></b><b><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJQ32q2k8Uo">Beethoven's 9th</a>: Baltimore Symphony - November 20th 3PM </b>I thought I was seeing a somewhat different concert from the one I ended up seeing. Instead of seeing John Adams's Absolute Jest on the first half of the program, I was treated to the sight of Marin Alsop and Ed Polochick (long time choral director at the BSO) teaching everyone in the audience the German words to the 'big tune' which we were all supposed to sing along with when the time came (the soloists looked thoroughly amused). It was a very nice albeit slightly absurd gesture, fun to sing along, slightly moving to be a part of even if a bit ridiculous, and thoroughly appropriate on this of all weeks. The performance itself was... again, thoroughly adequate. I've now heard Alsop and the BSO twice in Beethoven's 9th, this was easily the better of the two. Alsop clearly prefers fast tempos in Beethoven, which is all well and good if you have a crack ensemble or conducting technique to pull it off - neither Alsop or the BSO is either of those. It was certainly much more together and rhythmically on-point than it was when I heard them do it two or three years ago. But on this of all weeks, this perhaps greatest of all works of music can't help but make its cosmic impact, even in an abysmal performance, which this was not. No work of music ever conceived by the human mind fulfills the purpose of music better than Beethoven's 9th. Whatever the prevailing wind is in capital cities, Beethoven and particularly his 9th, will sell the tickets in the provinces as nothing else does, because its message is both shallow enough for the masses, deep enough for experts to always find something now, and universal enough that newbies can find something higher in themselves than they ever thought was possible and for experts to endlessly appreciate both the musical humor and the musical good humor. It is a reminder of hope in dark times, it always has been, and it always will be.<br /><br /><b>Beethoven Quartet op. 131:&nbsp;</b><br /><b>Ariel Quartet - November 19th, Kreeger Museum, DC</b><br /><b>St. Lawrence Quartet, November 20th, Shriver Hall, Baltimore</b><br />The late quartets are nowhere near as difficult as people make them out to be, but good god, op. 131 twice in twenty-four hours. Can anybody stomach that gravity along with taking in Hamlet and Beethoven's 9th?<br /><br />As it happened, I was rather tired Saturday night, having taken a longer than usual these days bikeride before I went to DC and was rather sleepy through the performance. The <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FUob2dcQTWA&amp;t=30s">Ariel Quartet</a> from Israel is still young, and technically not quite to the level of the very highest - not that that should ever inhibit anyone's enjoyment. They're a 'moving quartet', which bounces around so much that each of the players seems in need of a second chair. I'm a big fan of uninhibited movement in performance, but it better be accompanied by equivalent enthusiasm in the playing or else it seems like choreography. In this case, I wondered if their movement simply inhibited some their playing. Some smudged notes don't usually matter, but other issues kept creeping up that severely cramped one's enjoyment - some of which were not their fault. Among them was the fact that the quartet was hooked up to loudspeakers, and balanced at severely unequal volumes - my guess is that the speakers were imposed upon them by the facility, worried that their room would not have sufficient presence for a string quartet (why the hell are you hosting chamber music concerts then?). The second violin and viola were half as loud as the first violinist and two-thirds as loud as the cello. You couldn't possibly gauge the balance of the ensemble properly. In any event, the reason I went to DC was because they were playing three quartets that are particular favorites of mine.<br /><br />The <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cvSOdxNQ1hg">Mozart K. 387 i</a>s a wonderful piece, and was unfortunately played as though they'd barely rehearsed it. What was embarrassing was not the lack of technical finish, what was embarrassing was the utter generic anonymity of their performance - nary an original phrasing or color to be found in this composer who lives and dies by an instrumentalist's ability to phrase and color. Fortunately, matters improved significantly in <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IDeJeBvln6E&amp;t=1s">Shostakovich's 3rd Quartet</a>. Israeli string players usually learn Russian style, and have the same thick tone and vibrato which works on Russian music like a charm. All the character and involvement thoroughly lacking in Mozart was present in Shostakovich. One even sometimes heard what you never heard in the Mozart, a soft dynamic! And then you realize it wasn't just the speakers that hamper your enjoyment, they really did play the Mozart that badly. After intermission came the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WlFYC1U5viw&amp;t=13s">Beethoven 131</a>. It was thoroughly 'Russian' Beethoven, and no worse for it, full of enormous sounds, extremes of tempo and vibrato.... Huge variation of tempo in the long fourth movement, the 5th movement scherzo was so fast that I thought they'd fly apart (Mark Berry would have hated it...), but it didn't, just a fantastic piece of pure virtuosity to which they acquited themselves admirably. Would that there were a few more soft dynamics, but I'd imagine that the loudspeaker was no help at all in that regard.<br /><br />The Canadian St. Lawrence Quartet is a completely different kind of ensemble. The Israeli Ariel Quartet is clearly more at home among romanticism and risk, the St. Lawrence Quartet loves classicism - their sound is leaner, their technical finish is much greater, and they love adding as many little details into the piece as can ever be found. The first work on their program, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IWkzpt-WPK0&amp;t=41s">Haydn's "Joke Quartet"</a> was well-nigh perfect. Never have I heard a Haydn Quartet played this well live before - hundreds, perhaps thousands, of tiny details in rhythm and phrasing and balance added up to a kind of musical miracle. This was music! If their Beethoven is not quite on the same order of miracle, it was at times astonishing how close they came. Beethoven quartets demand that you give absolutely everything to him and leave your blood on the floor. Their performances of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=laUMuPkm7Ow">opuses 135 </a>and 131 tried to square the circle by saving themselves for the larger moments, and the climaxes felt not like something they earned but rather something 'turned on.' The tempos were not as extreme, but there were many more soft dynamics, and a huge variation of dynamics throughout. In the battle of the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQ8B_DlAshE">op. 131's</a>, the Canadians won thoroughly, but I do wish they'd risked as much as their Israeli counterparts, even if some of the risks didn't pay off.<br /><b><br /></b><b>Book Revisitation: Hamlet </b>Watching Hamlet made me want to go back for the first time in a few years to the text itself. When you read the text, it's not long before you realize what a goddamn mess it is. It's so incoherent, so dramatically unstructured, so deliberately obscure in its language, that at times it either seems like an extraordinary work of avant-garde, almost Joycean stream of consciousness; or, it's just, as TS Eliot defined it, an artistic failure. Shakespeare, of all writers, deserves the benefit of the doubt - particularly in Hamlet of all plays, which, even if I'm not quite 100% certain it deserves its reputation, the rest of the known world most certainly is.<br /><br />What immediately becomes apparent, at least on this reading, is that Hamlet has been hacked to pieces by actors and directors who want to give him far more humanity than the text seems to give him. He is, from the beginning, something approaching a psychopath. I have often wondered if the 'To Be or Not To Be' speech is supposed to be given not as a soliloquy on self-slaughter, but as a murderous threat to an already on-stage (and possibly pregnant) Ophelia ("look to your daughter").<br /><br />Hamlet is either too large or too incoherent to capture all of him in any one interpretation. But what truly reveals itself is Hamlet's utter nihilism - he's the dark reaching out for the dark, a nihilism beyond narcissism, beyond psychopathy, a force that sees the destruction of the court, of supposed friends like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, of supposed allies like the Polonius family, and takes a kind of subtle delight in it. By the time Fortinbras says that Hamlet would have proved a most excellent King of Denmark, I half expect every surviving courtier to burst out laughing. &nbsp;The bony specter of death reaches through it all, but beyond its nihilism is a somewhat pervading sense that Hamlet earned his nihilism. As Harold Bloom rightly says, there's no mention of anyone loving Hamlet, they merely kiss up to him in the hope of earning his favor. Horatio is the closest he has to a friend, but Horatio is a cipher, an audience stand-in, a receptacle for Hamlet's unsoliloquized thoughts. The Elsinore that surrounds him is a disintegrating antique ready to blow over with the slightest ill wind. Hamlet is rooting for its destruction, and if he procrastinates, I wonder if it isn't because he's worried that the destruction he can create<br /><br />If I ever had a chance to play Hamlet - which of course will never happen but I'm still only four years older than he, I would play the nihilism for all its worth. The first lines of the first soliloquy ('o that this too too solid flesh would melt, thaw, and resolve itself into a dew') would not be addressed to himself or his own depression, but would be addressed as a comment upon the audience. Hamlet is a great hater, and hates everyone with whom he comes into contact. He's so bored with life that when he sees the Ghost who charges him with a mission, Hamlet's thought is not of awe or of hurt at his life circumstances, but of delight that a new perspective has arisen ('more things in the heaven and the earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy') that can surprise him for the first time in many years. He was well on the way to insanity before the Ghost appeared, what the Ghost did, rather, was to give him a new lease on life. Nobody ever treated him as any kind of peer, so Hamlet's only audience is himself, and to amuse himself, he babbles incoherently. When it's time for To Be or Not To Be, he's not focused on self-murder, he's focused on the possibility of murdering Ophelia ('with more offences at my beck than I have thoughts to put them in'), and I wonder why nobody has ever thought to have Ophelia do her mad scenes, and possibly much before that, in a showing state of pregnancy. The scenes with his mother have much less to do with veiled incest or incestuous thoughts than they do with his innate way of obsessively dramatizing and catastrophizing everything into the most nihilistic manner he can imagine. When he treats his mother with tenderness, it is out of the final vestiges of duty to which he feels. His 'trolling' of Ophelia's funeral is not a true outpouring of grief, but a way to stir up trouble and provoke a court which tried to send him to his death. At this point in my life, Hamlet seems a rank nihilist and scoundrel to whom nothing matters at the beginning or end of the play. If he is not a villain, it's because a villainous place made him villainous.&nbsp;</div>Evan Tuckerhttps://plus.google.com/101333496816879280258noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5120202207964289878.post-81948247092994501272016-11-17T19:36:00.010-05:002016-11-24T01:15:07.948-05:00How We Got Here: A Cultural History of the 21st Century - Episode I Don't f***ing know<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: &quot;arial&quot; , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">Greetings, salutations, welcome, and all due appropriate sentiments to this episode #0 of "How We Got Here: A Cultural History of the 21st Century."&nbsp;</span><br /><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: small;"><br /></div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: small;">We have just emerged from the Television era. I believe that in the past generation, it is not movies or music that has represented us most accurately, however well some in each field of the Arts do, and it's certainly not fiction or art. Far more than any other medium, TV gives its creators the freedom and diversity to show our lives accurately.&nbsp; This podcaster was born at the cusp between Generation X and Millennials, we were not only born in the television era, but even our parents can't remember a time before television. But our parents grew up with three basic networks, we grew up with thirty, and by the time we became adults, we had 300.&nbsp;</div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: small;"><br /></div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: small;">I would imagine that we are now in the Podcast Era - hence why I'm here. But there is a great difference between TV and Television. TV is entertainment, Television is art. TV is escapist, Television is cathartic. TV exists to comfort us, Television exists to drive us mad.&nbsp;</div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: small;"><br /></div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: small;">I would date the emergence of Television rather than TV to somewhere between the final episode of Seinfeld in May 1998 and the pilot episode of The Sopranos in January of 1999. Something in the American air changed during those months much as they seemed to in the Fall of 2014.&nbsp;</div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: small;"><br /></div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: small;">The thirties were the decade of fascism, the eighties were the decade when Communism fell. The nineties were the decade of the blowjob. The 'quote-unquote Great Event', the most famous of 1998, and indeed, of the whole decade, was the Lewinsky investigation and the Clinton impeachment, which everyone both Right and Left agreed, represented an absolute low in American discourse - during a period so seemingly prosperous and indolent that the country had nothing better to do but to talk about for an entire year than the President getting head underneath the desk of the Oval Office. Nevertheless, this roughly nine-month period between Seinfeld and The Sopranos set the stage for everything that would come - sincerely no pun intended. The great political development of that period was the Drudge Report - traditional news, even 24 hour news, even FOX News, could not possibly keep up with the proliferation of trivial but distracting political stories, or entirely made up stories, that cater to the prejudices of people who believe that traditional journalism has an inherent bias - and if not that many millions of people believed that traditional news had no bias before the Drudge Report, the Drudge Report alone convinced millions. No newspaper, no television network, could ever keep up with an aggregating website that could send its audience down a rabbithole of information, often false but certainly not always, that was available to them at the click of a button. But if one needs a substantive great event for this period that contributed to American life and history - one should remember was that this was the period when the bulk of debate was conducted over whether to repeal the Glass-Steagal act, a financial act passed barely more than three months months into the Roosevelt administration. Glass-Steagal was the most important substance of the Banking Act of 1933 which established a wall between commercial banks and securities firms. What Glass-Steagall meant in laymen terms is that a commercial bank at which middle class people could store their money with expectations that the money could stay put, could not itself be invested in stocks and funds so that banks could potentially make more money for both the bank and for its customers. In theory, eliminating the separation can reap incredible financial benefits to both bankers and their customers, and in practice, that's exactly what happened until The Great Recession of 2008, when it was shown pretty much definitively that commercial banks trying to increase their holdings through the stock market was spectacularly irresponsible - I suppose I'm giving away my political bias right at the beginning of this series - are there really that many conservative podcasters anyway? Compared to most progressive podcasters I'm downright moderate. But regardless of whether one is liberal or conservative, moderate or progressive, alt-right or intersectional warrior for social justice, everyone seems to agree that something extremely dangerous happened in American life during this period - even if we all disagree about what the particular dangers were that we passed. Whatever the center of American life was, whatever America's basic expectations and routines were, it seemed to be hollowed out sometime around that infamous year of 1998. Around the corner was the twenty-first century, and while America is still unquestionably the world's #1 world power, we are all the more vulnerable because of our indispensability, and every American would seem to agree that the 21st century beset our country with an endless parade of hopelessness. Not hopelessness by the standards of history, but hopelessness by the standards of the most prosperous and wealthiest nation in the history of the Earth.&nbsp;</div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: small;"><br /></div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: small;">It is impossible to look at Art and not see it in some way tell the story of the era in which it was made, and it is further impossible, much as aesthetes like Vladimir Nabokov would disagree, to look at Art without reading parallels into it from the real world - or from our own lives, or from the lives of people we know and love or hate, or parallels from the metaphysical cosmos at large and those basic but still deep truths of what life and existence is.<br /><br />One of Art's great secrets is its societal tremors, Art is a societal seizmograph. With obvious exceptions of course, a secure era always seems to be dominated by secure Art in which the rules are clearly defined. The vast majority of the 18th century, with its intricate and unbreakable monarchical hierarchies, was the archetype of a society in which art was created with extremely distinct rules so as to not upset the precarious balance of an incredibly intricate societal structure. All official European and American buildings seemed to be designed with the kind of columns one finds in Ancient Greece or Rome, with heights determined by mathematical ratios found in nature so as to provide the most harmonious possible surroundings. Nearly all pictorial art was designed by schematic before the schematic was painted over. All music ends in the same key in which it begins, and the phrase-lengths are inevitably kept in multiples of four. The poetry was almost inevitably kept in strictest possible couplet form. The expectations of what art was supposed to be were ironclad. But as anyone who grew up in the suburbs can tell you, predictability can at times feel like a kind of prison, and when the prison walls come down, the chaos is that much more explosive because nobody remembers what chaos feels like.<br /><br />By 1789, France, the kingdom well-known for having the most intricate of all Europe's monarchical hierarchies, was beset by a revolution. First came a financial crisis, then collapse, then the rise of the Jacobins and the guillotine, then the execution of a few hundred noblemen, then the rise of Robespierre who executed most of the other Jacobins and eventually was himself executed for having been responsible for the execution of 20,000 Frenchmen, then came the ten year French Revolutionary War which killed somewhere between 300,000 and 1.1 million French, and then came Napoleon to unite France under his dictatorship and who decided he needed to put the rest of Europe under an Empire united under his rule, and somewhere between 3.5 and 6 million died for the cause of his ambition to conquer the world. When there is too much order, the ensuing chaos become all the worse. It was an avalanche of death that claimed ever more lives for twenty-six years before it finally stopped.<br /><br />War did not rage throughout the supposedly civilized part of the world for another hundred years, when it broke out again in 1914, it took thirty-one years to stop, and in the meantime, if we go by the estimates of R. J. Rummel, probably the best known scholar of state murder who has an easily accessible website if you can stomach such a thing, we lost somewhere between 17 and 18 million to World War One, somewhere between 20 to 50 million in the Spanish Influenza which broke out because of the unsanitariness of the battlefields, an estimated seven million who starved to death in various countries during the Great Depression, another estimated 5 to 9 million deaths due to the Russian Civil War of the early 1920s which broke out after the collapse of the Czar, and the four million deaths for which Lenin was directly responsible after he consolidated power, and the 5 million killed by Imperial Japan, the 20 million dead in the Chinese Civil War of the 30s and 40s, for which the Communist party led by Mao in the few years before he assumed power was responsible for 4 million deaths alone, the four million Chinese Deaths for which Chiang-Kai Shek's right-wing nationalist government was responsible, the Armenian Genocide perpetrated by Turkish generals which killed roughly 1.8 million if one counts a few hundred thousand non-Armenians also murdered, and the nearly million people killed by the allegedly great Ataturk who is still revered by American neoconservatives as the model of an incorruptible secularizing dictator, the well over a million killed in quote-unquote minor European dictatorships, another roughly 20 million killed in various ways by Hitler's Nazis for which we needn't elaborate, and the probable upward of 50 million people killed by Stalin's various orders and policies alone. It is macabre at best to list these totals and then add all of them up, but let's just say that the wars of the early twentieth century killed so far over a hundred million people that it's probably closer to two-hundred million. One then adds up the stupefying death tolls of the Cold War and the quote unquote Third World upon whom it was mostly perpetrated, the roughly twelve million Soviets for which dictators after Stalin were responsible, the 2 million dead in the killing fields of Pol-Pot's Cambodia, the roughly 1.7 million killed by North Korea, another 1.7 million killed in the Vietnam War and its aftermath, the 1.5 million dead in the Polish Civil War which killed my great-aunt after surviving the Holocaust, the 1.5 million killed by the various Pakistani military dictatorships, the 1.1 million killed in Yugoslavia, yes, the 6 million dead from United States actions in the Cold War. And worst of all, the roughly seventy-seven million killed in Mao's China, for which no truly reliable total is possible, and some estimates go up to a hundred twenty million people. While estimates are obviously unreliable, evidence would seem to point to that five hundred years of traditional Western mercantile Imperialism with all its attendant mass murders and starvations and diseases and slaveries cannot come even remotely close to equalling the total number of deaths engendered by thirty-one years of advanced warfare, let alone an entire global century of it. In fact, for five hundred years of Western Imperialism to reach anything even resembling the equivalent death tolls of the twentieth century one would have to not only accept the very highest estimates - such as putting the total Native Americans killed at 120 million people higher than than the 15 million that is generally supposed, but also include the casualties of Islamic Imperialism. It makes me sick to my stomach that I've said anything that sounds like a justification for allowing for the practices of imperalism, be it in historic mercantile form or in contemporary unregulated capitalist form, to continue. I'm even slightly doubtful about the statistics and continually worry that I've misread them, every time I've read them they've surprised the hell out me, I know that any comparison I make will sound like a defense of imperialism and yet...<br /><br />While a few people of direct descent from Survivors of Hitler or Stalin or Mao, or veterans of the world's bloodiest wars, become extraordinarily committed social justice warriors, perhaps the most committed of them all for the knowledge they see so close at hand, I find that the blood-curdling stories of the Twentieth Century at its worst makes it difficult to work oneself into sufficient commitment to fighting for every person suffering under injustice. In my experience, most Jewish-Americans I've met, most Chinese-Americans, most Soviet-Americans, all of for whom privilege is still a relatively unfamiliar concept that we're viscerally terrified to lose because many members who experienced the very worst of the twentieth century still live, have similar difficulties. We know just how much more unjust and cursed the world can become than it currently is, and are extremely mistrustful of militants, of the right and left, who would send us hurtling closer toward its potential. And if the neoimperial injustices of unregulated vulture capitalism add up and the financial system completely collapses sometime around 2040 and sends the world spinning into a Third World War, and perhaps then an even worse Fourth World War thereafter, would it be unreasonable to assume that the next world war would claim yet another multiple of ten - more a billion lives as its eternal property? Would it be unreasonable to assume that the aftereffects of dictatorship and illness and proxy war and yes, imperial wage slavery, from the conditions it leaves could claim another two billion? Or is that underestimating the number of possible casualties?<br /><br />All this talk of mass death and murder is to give you the proper context to talk about Seinfeld.<br /><br />An insecure era will be dominated by insecure art. Let's just speak about painting for a moment. Over what we generally call the long 19th century, starting with the French Revolution hopeful enactment and stretching until World War I's senseless beginning in 1914, the art of the continent became more and more insecure, less and less dominated by rules. The visual art went from David and Canelleto's almost geometric naturalism to washes of color from Delacroix and Turner and the grotesque caricatures of Goya and Blake. The washes of color eventually became the impressionism of Monet and Cezanne. The grotesqueries eventually became the expressionism of Munch and Georg Grosz. It was no longer agreed as it was since Classical Greece that the purpose of art is to render life and nature as it is. For many artists, the purpose of art became art itself, its various colors and shapes. For others, the purpose of art was to disturb life and distort nature, not to conjure scientific images in the mind of shapes and colors, but to conjure poetic images with distortions that one can only see on one's own in dreams. Fairly soon thereafter, the two poles merged back into each other, and impressionist and expressionist art and its attendent movements seemed roughly interchangeable. There was, and remains, much great art in the 20th and 21st centuries, but without an agreed upon basis, there are fewer artists in whose work people seem to trace the spirit of an era, a place, a condition - and if there is, then all too few people know about it. Traditional art as Europeans defined it since the dawn of history had broken apart, and will most likely never be put back together.<br /><div><br /></div>One could trace the development of classical music, of poetry, of fiction, through similar permutations. But what was clear in each was that by 1914, the foundations and structures in which each artform was traditionally thought to be built upon were completely shattered, few people care about it anymore, and very few artists have found a way to make other people care about what we do. Most of us who operate in the traditional arts in our day are, for better or worse, radical in ways that are entirely conventional, and generally reject the wider world with its capitalist compromises because capitalism allows us the luxury of radical worldviews - in spite of our supposed subversion, we artists are still educated enough make a lower-middle-class income - through the arts or otherwise, which is just barely low enough to convince some people that we're truly impoverished, and therefore have justification to speak for the plights of marginalized peoples whom we understand not at all. Traditional religion has been thrown out, a development probably for the better, but metaphysics has been thrown out with it. The goal of many, perhaps even the majority of artists today, is to improve the world through one's art - wouldn't it be better then to pick up a tool box and build houses for the homeless? There is no such thing as art that improves the world - there is only art that makes the world a more pleasing place to live - and while there is no little consolation in that, art often makes the world a more pleasing place for risible people who do not deserve to be pleased. The most powerful thing art can do is precisely the opposite, art allows for the possibility that there may be other worlds, alternate realities, transcendent dimensions, which are more meaningful than this rather banal one where our hard work and suffering goes so unrewarded.<br /><br />But in America, a new art, a popular art for a less aristocratic consumer, took flight. A nascent art, still in 2016 just barely out of its infancy. Neither an aristocratic art made by servants to an aristocratic class, nor a folk art made by anonymous artisans and developed anonymously in an oral tradition over thousands of years. A popular art, an art of the people, by the people, and for the people, with few more truly distinguished creators than there are in today's traditional arts. And yet, the possibilities it holds for the next few thousand years are at least as infinite as the possibilities were at the dawn of Western Civilization. If a three-minute, four-chord, pop song, with a verse, a chorus, and a bridge, can yield material as good as Let It Be and The Times They Are a-Changin', let alone Fight the Power or The Message; or a hundred minute studio movie yield Citizen Kane or Rear Window, let alone The Godfather or Nashville, or a fifty page comic book yield Batman and X-Men, let alone Watchmen or Maus; or a commercialized TV schedule yield Seinfeld and The Simpsons, let alone The Sopranos pr Mad Men, how much more is yet possible to extract from these rather flimsy and constricted cultural forms created from material that are a literal reset button from the arts as they've been practiced for three thousand years?<br /><br />America was able to yield such a secure art in the 20th century, housing a surprising number of bright lights within its extraordinarily severe contours, because it was inexperienced in the ways of the world. Until the inception of the American republic, the idea of a successful republic was an ahistorical phenomenon, a concept the world abandoned two-thousand years previously because it was thought so unfeasible. It was, as Piero Scaruffi put it on his indispensible website: a Copernican Revolution in political thinking.<br /><br />America is as sinful as any nation can conceivably be, perhaps more sinful considering the overwhelming hypocrisy of the country's actions in relation to its ideals. With the election of this new President, it may stand to reason that the fibre which gradually improves this hypocritical republic from generation to generation has vanished completely, and will not reappear again in our lifetimes. Other nations have since taken the American model and improved greatly upon it. Perhaps the greatest compliment to the America is that the greatest, most sustainable improvement yet made upon the American first draft of a freer world is modern Germany, a nation America once subdued with overwhelming and truly murderous force - and yet Germany, just seventy-five years ago the most totalitarian nation on Earth, is currently the world's most thriving multicultural democracy. <br /><br /><br />-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------<br /><br /><br />We never know if or when a main character in The Sopranos or The Wire will survive or die - let alone Game of Thrones. We never know what taboo South Park or Family Guy will break next. We never know what incomprehensible twisting of form Arrested Development or Lost will embrace and we're not sure we understand it when they do it.</div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: small;"><br /></div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: small;"></div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: small;">Before the Television Era came the TV era. The TV era began in the early 80's and continued until the late 90's. TV had been around for 30 years, perhaps generation and a half, and TV writers finally understood how to write for it. In the 50's, often referred to until recently as the Golden Age of Television, the greatest shows were in many ways high culture mass produced for a larger audience. There were three big networks, all of whom established themselves as empires in the days of radio - American Broadcasting Corporation, National Broadcasting Corporation, Columbia Broadcasting System; ABC, NBC, CBS. Though challenged as never before, they are still the 'big three', and because they are challenged so frequently, the quality of their programming has declined precipitously from what it once was to appeal to the most escapist common denominator. There were a variety of networks that tried to challenge the Big Three's supremacy in many ways, and until FOX in the 80's, all of them failed to establish a secure place as even the #4 network. Today, the Networks are perhaps creaking antiques, but in the 50's, they were as unquestioned an empire as the country which let them dominate, and as every empire does that wants to remain an empire, the Big Three embarked upon projects designed for good public relations. They seemed determined to bring a kind of enoblement to the masses. Leonard Bernstein broadcasted lectures on classical music after football games, Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals were telecasted after sitcoms. Plays by Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller appeared before detective shows. All three genres had famous composers and writers working on projects directly for television. Playwrights and composers who never quite made it were enlisted to write for lowerbrow shows that raised the quality of production to heights that were not seen again for thirty years. Great vaudevillians and great young comedians wrote for sitcoms - and for a young comedian, writing a sitcom was considered a stepping stone for a great career in standup. The reason for all this quality was probably nothing but good public relations, but contrary to what so many believe today, good public relations is not an inherent vice, and often is an indicator of sincere virtue. Regardless of whether the means were justified, what is undeniable is that high culture proliferated in the early days of Television, which was as diverse in its highbrow to lowbrow content as vaudeville once was and European television is today.&nbsp;</div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: small;"><br /></div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: small;">By the 1960's, TV earned an audience of hundreds of millions, and became far lazier. was not known as a wasteland until the 60's and 70's, when television generally became formulaic and lazy. Fictional shows were usually mass-produced, sometimes at forty episodes per year, and some would stay on the air for twenty years at a time. The audience for these shows was as absolutely huge as the most read internet sites are in our day, but the reason for television's popularity was for escapism, not challenge or catharsis. However extraordinary some internet content is, hundreds of millions of people in our day do not look to Youtube or Funny or Die for anything but escapism. If they look at the astonishing proliferation of political websites, they look mostly to confirm their own biases. In the same way, people watched Gunsmoke, The Beverly Hillbillies, Bonanza, Andy Griffith, and Happy Days to unwind in the same way we look at youtube today and previous generations of Americans went to the movies. There were exceptions, some of them like MASH and All In The Family were of exceptional quality, but from the very late 50's to early 80's, it was to movies that people went for edification, for catharsis, for emotional food and intellectual challenge. As amazing as it seems today, in the early-to-mid sixties, it was to foreign films that many, many Americans went for such things until the late sixties, when a few dozen American directors began making movies of perhaps unprecedented quality in the already long and illustrious history of film. We are still so close to the Age of Movies that we don't remember them, but there are literally hundreds of great films from this era of comparable quality to The Godfather. The mass audience had deserted movies for TV, which was more convenient. All that remained was the people who were up for adventure, and did they ever get it in director-driven movies that were mostly as unpredictably dark as most of the producer-driven movies of yesteryear were reliably sunny.&nbsp;</div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: small;"><br /></div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: small;">But by the 80's, writers had so much experience writing for TV that they accumulated decades of wisdom for what works and what doesn't. TV was still mass produced, but the quality of it was much, much higher. Sitcoms with their canned laughter and schtick in place of jokes, were once considered the dumping ground for mediocrity - but with Newhart, Night Court, (gulp) The Cosby Show, The Wonder Years, Family Ties, Thirtysomething, Moonlighting, and especially Cheers, possessing virtuoso casts and writers who'd become seasoned pros, TV comedy became something more than it once was - a form of entertainment was beginning to be raised to an art as the great studio movies of yesteryear were. Even the laughtrack was omitted from some of them. A stable art that no matter how weird or occasionally fraught with conflict, upheld the importance of traditional values like family, friendship, romance, and the workplace nevertheless.&nbsp;</div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: small;"><br /></div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: small;">But there was, of course, another side to the 80's. What about all those people cut out of Reaganite prosperity? How were they represented? Representing scientists who saw their funding cut to nubs, there was Quantum Leap, which seemed to at least a few to represent the frustration of an era that first declared war on science.&nbsp; For the gay experience during their darkest decade, there was Pee-Wee's Playhouse, which was, unbelievably, a kids show because the only place where the camp that dare not speak its name could find a regular place for itself in mainstream entertainment.&nbsp; You had Hill Street Blues, a serialized police drama depicting the streets of an unnamed American cities with a handheld camera - the camera itself was literally as unstable as the material it covered. There was St. Elsewhere, a teaching hospital in a poor South Boston neighborhood seeing times harder than ever before in which the final episode is universally considered the most unpredictable moment in the history of television - I won't spoil it for those who don't know. But ultimately, the tremors mostly remained off-camera - swept under the rug.&nbsp; Quantum Leap exposed millions to the wonders of science's possibilities, but did nothing to explain how those wonders were being gutted. Even to those who understood Pee-Wee's true identity, it was a show which put the happiest possible face on a community that was dying by the thousands. And while both Hill Street Blues and St. Elsewhere were about urban blight, neither was told from the point of view of the blighted. In a few cases, it was told from the point of view of the blighter.</div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: small;"><br /></div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: small;"><br /></div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: small;">In the 90's TV got ten times still better. There is no question that The Simpsons, Seinfeld, Frasier, The Larry Sanders Show, Rosanne, Everybody Loves Raymond, Newsradio, Beavis and Butthead, Married with Children (yes, even Married with Children), The X-Files, Star Trek TNG and Deep Space Nine, My So Called Life, NYPD Blue, Picket Fences, were entertainment raised fully to the quality of art, some of it to the quality of timeless art. But virtually all of them were created as entertainment first, and any art put into them was mostly snuck in under the noses of the networks which broadcasted them.&nbsp;</div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: small;"><br /></div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: small;">For an ever so slightly more liberal era, many of them espoused values that were clearly more liberal than the great TV shows of the 80's. The new Star Trek franchise was not primarily about science, it was about politics - it was about the challenges of upholding a liberal order in the chaos of the wider universe - the galaxy itself became a parable for our world, and a beacon of inspiration that it was still possible to stay true to principles of improvement and justice when all about you is bellicosity. Frasier, for all it makes fun of its main character's pomp, took the intellectuality always on display in Cheers, amped it to the n'th degree, and displayed it on television as a true badge of honor. Everybody Loves Raymond, still one of the most misunderstood shows of all time, had the bravery to show that family values are worth upholding in part because families can be nightmarish prisons in which people who care about one another can tear one another to shreds - but that family is still a valuable institution because no matter how much a family hates each other at any given moment, they will still come through for one another as no one else will. NYPD Blue was utterly unashamed to portray its characters as something other than upholders of law and order, as sometime bigots who take out their hostility on the very people they're supposed to protect and defend. In the wake of the new Presidency, Rosanne may still prove the most relevant show of all - it displayed the frustrations and heartbreak of the forgotten working class and suggested that the prosperity of the American overclass, experiencing more prosperity than ever beore, forgot that some people were getting much poorer. Homicide, Life On the Street, the laboratory out of which David Simon grew The Wire, was ostensibly a police drama, but dared to tell nearly as many stories of the people protected and prosecuted in equal measure by the detectives. Beavis and Butthead was an unequivocal condemnation of its main character's idiocy.&nbsp;</div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: small;"><br /></div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: small;">But everybody knows that there were two shows that there were two shows that dominated the era like colossi, and set the stage for everything to come. They are, in all probability, the American literature of the age - the semi-sacred texts we always return to for wisdom and memory and ritual and comfort and it's so stupid to speak about them so pompously because Art was the last thing they were ever meant to be.&nbsp;</div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: small;"><br /></div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: small;">For my parents' generation, that show was Seinfeld. Seinfeld is the ultimate Baby Boomer show, and the show with which they came of age as the Masters of their Domain. It is an almost literally perfect show - as perfect in its way as Mozart piano concerto or a Raphael fresco. There may not be any particularly profound idea within it, but the perfection itself is a kind of profundity. In every twenty-two minute episode, four of the best performers on Earth immersed themselves in four separate story lines that would intersect at the end of the episode in a completely unexpected, but completely satisfying way. Forty-five years of the accumulated TV wisdom of writers, actors, cameramen, and production designers, built to this one show. &nbsp;</div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: small;"><br />In the half-hour sitcom, where compression is the key to it all, any emotional bond with the characters is dead weight, a place where the show wastes time being serious when there could be a joke in its place. There are many shows, good ones, where sitcom characters can be quite serious, but very few people would watch them if these characters did not also make them laugh. Far funnier, therefore, is to have an unlikeable character you can humiliate with their comeuppance, and since they're so unlikeable, they never learn their lesson, and they can be humiliated week after week. Comic characters cede a huge amount of their comedy if they grow, therefore, Larry David proposed the most inspired two rules of Seinfeld: No Learning, No Hugging. I occasionally think to myself that the truest progenitor of Seinfeld might be John Cleese's Fawlty Towers, in which Cleese plays a hotel operator of such pure bile that his continual humiliation is always completely deserved and completely satisfying.&nbsp;</div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: small;"><br /></div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: small;">Seinfeld was billed, still notoriously, as a show about nothing. Seinfeld was very much not a show about nothing. The Nothing, however, was how Seinfeld got away with the Somethings it was truly about. Seinfeld is about taboo - mentioning all those things one does not mention on TV because one does not mention them in polite company. Some of these taboos were a bit shocking in what they discussed in detail: masturbation, faking orgasms, bullemia, breast augmentation, blackface, stalking, stereotyping of immigrants, ogling teenagers, fetishizing Asian women, the possibility of turning gay men straight, even an allegory of date rape.<br /><br />Seinfeld began its airing during the tail end of the first Culture War, when figures in the conservative public intellectual industry like Alan Bloom, Roger Kimball, William Bennett, Norman Podhoretz, James Davison Hunter, Robert Bork, and of course Pat Buchanan and Newt Gingrich fought back against what they saw as the encroachment of liberal permissiveness against the bedrock conservative values that preserve a country from its decline - secular liberal values like abortion, contraception, recreational drug use, limitations on gun use, separation of Church from State, the right to be openly homosexual or transgender, lack of censorship. On the other side of this culture war were the figures of what began to be termed - political correctness. What was, until the late eighties, a Soviet term - usually conveyed in hushed tones - for an unobjectionably proper appointment of a functionary to a position of bureaucratic power - meaning that the potential appointee says nothing objectionable, does nothing objectionable, thinks nothing objectionable, will never challenge the official party line.<br /><br />Conservatives began to use it against as a pejorative, but it was taken up by certain more extreme figures of the academic left as a badge of honor. Most of the Baby Boomers moderated significantly in their politics, and became as militantly of the radical Left as their grandparents' professors had been militantly of the radical Right - academia, it would seem, forever gravitates to extremes. Even academic Marxism became somewhat passe, and after what might be termed the final generation of true American Marxists: Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky and Christopher Lasch and Fredric Jameson, considered by later thinkers to be hopelessly trapped in their white male privilege, the most important American theorists of the radical left - while no less savage toward capitalism - seemed to believe that the rather abstract idea of social class itself was a means by which one racial group or gender or sexuality continued to oppress another for not allowing for oppression within the oppression. Social class was considered utterly outmoded and monolithic and insufficient to explain the vagueries of oppressions' mechanisms. Ever new critical theorists emerged from academic journals with ever new theories of oppression with entirely new hierarchies and taboos: what the literary critic Harold Bloom referred to as the School of Resentment - at the front of the line was Edward Said with his theory of Orientalism which states that the very concept of the East in Western writers and all their attendant cultural observations were a means of oppressing ghettoizing those peoples not from the West, Judith Butler had theories about the oppression of binary gender, Andrea Dworkin about the oppression of pornography, Paul Goodman about the oppression of modern technology, Robert McChesney about the oppressiveness of media. The reading of critical theory text surpassed the reading of primary documents as the prime object of a humanities education on the university level - classic texts, be it fiction or poetry or history or philosophy, was implicated as former tools of oppression, and therefore, by and large outmoded at best, dangerous at worst.<br /><br />Are their theories correct or incorrect? Are their theories beneficial or dangerous? While the opinion of this caster is obvious by now, this is nevertheless not the place to ride these theories and their adherents too hard. What is undeniable though is the shockwaves sent by them through the life of America, and possibly through the life of the world. What has become clear over this quarter-century is that around 1990 second American religion was being born. A secular religion. A religion not unlike the Marxists and Communists of European yesteryear. A religion with as many orthodoxies and heresies to fight over as occurred when various forms of Christianity competed with one another for adherents and converts, and in the process created the traditional values which we now know as the dying 'Small Town America' values which culture warriors like William Bennett and Pat Buchanan still lead fights for along with whole new generations of culture warriors at their back. In this ascendent Age of the Internet, what once was an intellectual war fought on the pages of late-century intellectual journals is now a fight that takes place among millions, perhaps tens of millions, of laypeople of the internet - and threatens to turn into a kind of Civil War, a Holy War, and very much a violent war, over whether God or Social Justice is the most important element in American life. It is, most certainly, a one-sided war, in which the apparatus of power is entirely on the side of the traditional culture warriors, but because justice can never imposed on unjust people through peaceful action, social justice in the future will no longer be synonymous with peace activism - I am certain of it. The coming decades will harden them just as the democratic revolutionaries of 1848 were hardened into Marxist agitators for whom democracy was a horrifyingly messy process full of compromises and triage that had to be done away with. So if the world of 2016 is one for which the radical left agitates for peace, the inexorably coming tide against them will in all likelihood turn them by 2116 into something unrecognizably bellicose and authoritarian. Even standing toward the beginning of the historical process as we now are, we can perceive that what once was a rarefied academic war, incomprehensible to most, that had little if anything to do with the thriving, nihlistic, militantly undemanding, and exploitatively sensualist, popular culture that dominated American life of that late century American idyll which all of us over 30 remember so well - has become the prime motivator of contemporary American life in which taking a stand is virtually impossible to avoid. If the world's sole superpower has balkanized this much in twenty-five years, if the balkanization could not have been stopped by President Obama who talked so movingly in his first candidacy about how there is far more which unites us than divides us, how much more balkanized and hateful toward each other have we potential to become in the next 25 years?<br /><br /></div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: small;">It goes without saying that figures of both sides in the culture war were and remain scandalized by Seinfeld - albeit conservatives were far more vocal at the time. And yet, by being so reflective of an era that overturned taboos which existed for hundreds of years into trivialities, Seinfeld did as much as any cultural force in the world to create these new taboos of social justice about what cannot be mentioned in polite company - taboos which may last still more hundreds of years. Freedom is the most difficult and ephemeral concept in which people exist, and the vast majority of people will do what they can to place limitations on their freedom because individuality can be an inhuman burden to bear. Once an old heirarchy with its nittygritties and certain unmentionables are torn down, a new one will rise, inevitably and inexorably, almost as soon as the old one crumbles.&nbsp;</div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: small;"><br /></div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: small;">Seinfeld will not date well for the next few generations - I'm sure of that. More and more writers on the internet are professing offense at Seinfeld in a social justice manner that is entirely different from the manner in which the most vocal objectors, generally conservative, took offense at the time - some magazine journalists already are, and it is nothing less than a tribute to the show's subversive power. To the plurality of us in the midst of this culture war, liberal or conservative to varying extents but skeptical both about traditional sacred values and their radical upending, Seinfeld still seems like a revolutionary bomb launched into the propriety of people who want life to mean more it seems to mean. It is nothing less than a force of liberation. Certain things about it may date: the coded way which characters speak about the issues they discuss - 'master of your domain' in place of refraining to pleasure yourself, "refunding" in place of bullemia, 'shrinkage' to describe what penises do in cold water; do not seem shocking anymore, just an eccentric and perhaps pointless display of code. But Seinfeld's form is so ironclad that it works anyway in the context of the show's design, and will work just as easily in two-hundred years. What is liberating about Seinfeld in the age of Game of Thrones is that a show can shock so often and still be so light and joyful.<br /><br />It is difficult to recreate the shockwaves which so many Seinfeld episodes sent through American culture in the 90's. Seinfeld was merciless about addressing the taboos of the time, because they seemed to be asking us 'why are these taboos actually taboos?' And in the context of their era, it was entirely appropriate to ask. What the hell mattered to middle class white adults in the 90's? Their lives were so cut off from reality as most people live it - the suffering underclass of every race, the suffering of nearly every non-Western country, even the suffering which their American parents underwent to bring them to such privilege. To most people, life has consequence and matters because its continuance is not a given, but in 1990's America, it was very much a given, and there was nothing left to do but strip away those taboos which were once so significant in everyday life, but had long since turned into senseless trivialities. But what gave Seinfeld a far darker undertone is that even if life forces us to suffer more than four baby-boom-vaguely-Jewish-lower-upper-middle-class New Yorkers in the 1990's, does suffering make our lives mean more than they ever seemed to on Seinfeld? We have no proof that they do, and we have no proof that anything more verifiable is truly learned or felt in our lives than the very little that is learned or felt by the four lead characters of Seinfeld - all four of whom may very well have professed to liberalism then voted Trump.<br /><br />What makes Seinfeld brutal in retrospect is that we've learned all sorts of things since the 1990's, things that we cannot unlearn. But we, at least we the privileged, cannot ever be as joyful again as we were in the innocence of that era. We cannot turn back time to an era before all we learned from the Contract with America, the government shutdowns, Monicagate, Glass-Steagall's repeal, Bush v. Gore, 9/11, the Iraq Invasion, Abu Ghraib, Halliburton Contracts, Hurricaine Katrina, The 2008 crisis, The Great Recession, the difficulty of passing Obamacare, the realization that Pakistan was hiding Bin Laden for the better part of ten years, the police murders of countless African Americans, the urban riots of Ferguson and Baltimore, the difficulty of negotiating an international environmental emissions treaty or a peace treaty with Iran, or the nomination and election of this next occupier of the White House and all the horrors to come that may arise out of it. Surely so many bad things happened around the world in the more innocent era of the Reagans and the Clintons, but for whatever reason, we were not as aware of them - secure and innocent in our trivial bubbles of privilege.&nbsp;</div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: small;"><br /></div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: small;">We must remember, the Nineties was the Era of the End of History - which is the title of Francis Fukuyama's hugely influential neoconservative political science volume released in the wake of the Cold War's end which could have doubled as a thesis for why so many in the Bush Administration thought an Iraq invasion such a fantastic idea. The thesis of the book was that History has an end in both senses, that global conflict will now be a thing of the past, and that history has a purpose and a destiny, something resembling a live organism or a divinely mandated story that builds toward the realization that liberal democracy is the best of all possible governments. To Fukuyama, the arc of history is long, but it not only bends toward justice, but arrives there. Even if one agrees with the sentiment about liberal democracy, and I don't know how too many people can disagree, how idiotic those sentiments now seem and should have seemed at the time! And yet Fukuyama was not laughed at. Like all successful ideas, his thesis rose to the top of discourse because the thesis represented the national mood better than any other. To posterity, he is the great intellectual representative of his particular era, and like many intellectuals, he will in all likelihood be taken seriously by historians and philosophers and political scientists precisely because he was so wrong.&nbsp;</div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: small;"><br /></div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: small;">Seinfeld remains on in syndication seemingly eight times every day. People of a certain age still watch it religiously, endlessly reliving episodes that speak to them of their lives' zenith, when life seemed so endlessly prosperous and trivial and almost unbearably light. I wonder if, today, Baby Boomers do not look upon Seinfeld with a certain sadness and regret. Remembering their lives, remembering their country, remembering the Era of the End of History, when life was so relatively easy, and wondering how they could have not seen the warning signs of darker times to come. I think Milan Kundera put this problem best in a still reasonably famous quote from The Unbearable Lightness of Being if you can bare a gratuitous sexual intrusion of the type for which Kundera is truly notorious and which women may find offensive, my apologies in advance for his metaphor which is inappropriate for the matter at hand to the rest of the quote:</div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: small;"><br /></div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: small;">He says: "But is heaviness truly deplorable and lightness splendid? The heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink beneath it, it pins us to the ground. But in the love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man's body. The heaviest image is therefore simultaneously the image of life's most intense fulfillment. The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become. Conversely, the absolute absence of a burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into heights, to take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements are free as they are insignificant. What shall we then choose? Weight or lightness?"</div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: small;"><br /></div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: small;">I would add one sentence of my own to Kundera's somewhat famous quote: Our parents' generation chose lightness, therefore we are forced to choose weight.<br /><br />Seinfeld is a deceptively light show that stands in that long American tradition, the American Countersublime, in which lies all that great art whose truths are sufficiently horrifying that we wish we could run away from: in their various ways, they portray all that is dark, ignoble, shameful, contemptible, vile, and degenerate in human nature, in the American character, without offering us any redemptive humanity from its darkness, and once we encounter them, it's very difficult to escape the voyeuristic fascination they hold: Sleepy Hollow, The Tell Tale Heart, The Fall of the House of Usher, The Masque of Red Death, The Pit and the Pendulum, William Wilson, Dr. Heidegger's Experiment, Moby Dick, Billy Budd, Bartleby the Scrivener, The Turn of the Screw, The Devil's Dictionary, Birth of a Nation, The Tomb, The Tree, The Outsider, The Call of Cthulu, The Jungle, As I Lay Dying, Of Mice and Men, The Grapes of Wrath, Citizen Kane, Shadow of a Doubt, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, All About Eve, Sunset Boulevard, A Streetcar Named Desire, The Catcher in the Rye, A Good Man is Hard to Find, Rear Window, Invisible Man, The Searchers, Flowers for Algernon, Gypsy, Touch of Evil, Vertigo, North by Northwest, Psycho, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, Where The Red Fern Grows, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, Catch-22, The Bell Jar, Dr, Strangelove, In Cold Blood, Portnoy's Complaint, Patton, The French Connection, Dirty Harry, A Clockwork Orange, The Godfather, Deliverance, The Exorcist, Chinatown, Taxi Driver, Network, The Deer Hunter, Apocalypse Now, Sweeney Todd, Sophie's Choice, Little Shop of Horrors, Blood Meridian, Glengarry Glen Ross, American Psycho, Bonfire of the Vanities, GoodFellas, Assassins, The Silence of the Lambs, Unforgiven. And so many works, both TV and otherwise, of the 21st century, which we will talk about here in this series, clearly at great length. And yet, because the facets of nature they portray are so horrifying, they are necessary reminders of those dark crevasses of human nature which we wish we could avoid, but reminders that we need to find the strength at times to stoically bear life's dark side - and experiencing these works, which happen at the other side of a page or a screen, can be of enormous help. We are attracted back to these works like flies to a deadly hot light, like marble rye to a window. These are works about loathesome brutes, and yet we can't look away. So here's the miracle of Seinfeld, here's the miracle of Seinfeld - of all these works that offer no redemption, except for The Producers (and imagine if George Costanza is possible without either Max Bialystok or Leo Bloom), Seinfeld is perhaps the only one to offer the viewer any sort of respite from darkness, because it's told with such lightness and joy that the dark side of human nature can seem nothing but appealing.<br /><br />But if Seinfeld seems to take everything that's light about the American Experience and twist it into darkness, The Simpsons seems to take everything that's dark about the American Experience and transfigure it into light.<br /><br />The Simpsons are at least as crucial to our generation as Seinfeld is to our parents'...</div>Evan Tuckerhttps://plus.google.com/101333496816879280258noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5120202207964289878.post-63045040668383563232016-11-17T19:36:00.002-05:002016-11-18T22:15:18.970-05:00How We Got Here: A Cultural History of the 21st Century - Episode 0 (first two-thirds - rough)<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: &quot;arial&quot; , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">Greetings, salutations, welcome, and all due appropriate sentiments to this episode #0 of "How We Got Here: A Cultural History of the 21st Century."&nbsp;</span><br /><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: small;"><br /></div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: small;">We have just emerged from the Television era. I believe that in the past generation, it is not movies or music that has represented us most accurately, however well some in each field of the Arts do, and it's certainly not fiction or art. Far more than any other medium, TV gives its creators the freedom and diversity to show our lives accurately.&nbsp; This podcaster was born at the cusp between Generation X and Millennials, we were not only born in the television era, but even our parents can't remember a time before television. But our parents grew up with three basic networks, we grew up with thirty, and by the time we became adults, we had 300.&nbsp;</div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: small;"><br /></div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: small;">I would imagine that we are now in the Podcast Era - hence why I'm here. But there is a great difference between TV and Television. TV is entertainment, Television is art. TV is escapist, Television is cathartic. TV exists to comfort us, Television exists to drive us mad.&nbsp;</div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: small;"><br /></div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: small;">I would date the emergence of Television rather than TV to somewhere between the final episode of Seinfeld in May 1998 and the pilot episode of The Sopranos in January of 1999. Something in the American air changed during those months much as they seemed to in the Fall of 2014.&nbsp;</div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: small;"><br /></div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: small;">The 'quote-unquote Great Event' of that period was the Lewinsky investigation and the Clinton impeachment, which everyone both Right and Left agreed, represented a new low in American discourse in which the country had nothing better to talk about for an entire year than the President getting a blow job. The great political development of that period was the Drudge Report - traditional news, even 24 hour news, could no longer keep up with the proliferation of trivial but distracting political stories, or entirely made up stories, that cater to the prejudices of people who believe that traditional journalism have an inherent bias. No newspaper, no television network, could ever keep up with an aggregating website that could send its audience down a rabbithole of information, often false, that was available to them at the click of a button. But the great substantive event of this period in American history was that this was the period when more substantial debate was conducted over the repeal of the Glass-Steagal act, enacted in the beginning of the Roosevelt administration. Glass-Steagal was the banking act that allowed banks to diversify their holdings - unwittingly by some, perhaps wittingly by others - as unbelievable as that sounds, it set the stage for The Great Recession of 2008 and all sorts of other events to come. However it was done, the center of American life, its basic expectations and routines, was hollowed out in that infamous year of 1998.&nbsp;</div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: small;"><br /></div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: small;">Art is a societal seizmograph. It is impossible to look at Art and not see it tell the story of the era in which it was made, and it is impossible, much as Vladimir Nabokov would disagree, to look at Art without reading parallels into it from the real world - from our own lives, from the lives of people we know and love or hate, from the wider world at large. The great secret of Art is its societal tremors. With exceptions of course, a secure era will be dominated by secure Art where by the end, everything returns home to the place where it began. Homer Simpson, no matter what his mistakes, always keeps his family together. The Seinfeld Four, no matter what their venalities, are never held truly accountable until the final episode. No matter how long the doctors of MASH stay in Korea, their lives remain a never ending party and unless they're played by McLean Stevenson their security is rarely compromised. Norms are upheld, stability reigns, and no matter how complicated the leaps, the best Art has a kind of joyful virtuosity, with a perfectly comprehensible form and a perfectly executed landing at the end.&nbsp;</div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: small;"><br /></div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: small;">But an insecure era will be dominated by insecure art. We never know if or when a main character in The Sopranos or The Wire will survive or die - let alone Game of Thrones. We never know what taboo South Park or Family Guy will break next. We never know what incomprehensible twisting of form Arrested Development or Lost will embrace and we're not sure we understand it when they do it.<br /><br /></div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: small;"></div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: small;">Before the Television Era came the TV era. The TV era began in the early 80's and continued until the late 90's. TV had been around for 30 years, perhaps generation and a half, and TV writers finally understood how to write for it. In the 50's, often referred to until recently as the Golden Age of Television, the greatest shows were in many ways high culture mass produced for a larger audience. There were three big networks, all of whom established themselves as empires in the days of radio - American Broadcasting Corporation, National Broadcasting Corporation, Columbia Broadcasting System; ABC, NBC, CBS. Though challenged as never before, they are still the 'big three', and because they are challenged so frequently, the quality of their programming has declined precipitously from what it once was to appeal to the most escapist common denominator. There were a variety of networks that tried to challenge the Big Three's supremacy in many ways, and until FOX in the 80's, all of them failed to establish a secure place as even the #4 network. Today, the Networks are perhaps creaking antiques, but in the 50's, they were as unquestioned an empire as the country which let them dominate, and as every empire does that wants to remain an empire, the Big Three embarked upon projects designed for good public relations. They seemed determined to bring a kind of enoblement to the masses. Leonard Bernstein broadcasted lectures on classical music after football games, Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals were telecasted after sitcoms. Plays by Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller appeared before detective shows. All three genres had famous composers and writers working on projects directly for television. Playwrights and composers who never quite made it were enlisted to write for lowerbrow shows that raised the quality of production to heights that were not seen again for thirty years. Great vaudevillians and great young comedians wrote for sitcoms - and for a young comedian, writing a sitcom was considered a stepping stone for a great career in standup. The reason for all this quality was probably nothing but good public relations, but contrary to what so many believe today, good public relations is not an inherent vice, and often is an indicator of sincere virtue. Regardless of whether the means were justified, what is undeniable is that high culture proliferated in the early days of Television, which was as diverse in its highbrow to lowbrow content as vaudeville once was and European television is today.&nbsp;</div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: small;"><br /></div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: small;">By the 1960's, TV earned an audience of hundreds of millions, and became far lazier. was not known as a wasteland until the 60's and 70's, when television generally became formulaic and lazy. Fictional shows were usually mass-produced, sometimes at forty episodes per year, and some would stay on the air for twenty years at a time. The audience for these shows was as absolutely huge as the most read internet sites are in our day, but the reason for television's popularity was for escapism, not challenge or catharsis. However extraordinary some internet content is, hundreds of millions of people in our day do not look to Youtube or Funny or Die for anything but escapism. If they look at the astonishing proliferation of political websites, they look mostly to confirm their own biases. In the same way, people watched Gunsmoke, The Beverly Hillbillies, Bonanza, Andy Griffith, and Happy Days to unwind in the same way we look at youtube today and previous generations of Americans went to the movies. There were exceptions, some of them like MASH and All In The Family were of exceptional quality, but from the very late 50's to early 80's, it was to movies that people went for edification, for catharsis, for emotional food and intellectual challenge. As amazing as it seems today, in the early-to-mid sixties, it was to foreign films that many, many Americans went for such things until the late sixties, when a few dozen American directors began making movies of perhaps unprecedented quality in the already long and illustrious history of film. We are still so close to the Age of Movies that we don't remember them, but there are literally hundreds of great films from this era of comparable quality to The Godfather. The mass audience had deserted movies for TV, which was more convenient. All that remained was the people who were up for adventure, and did they ever get it in director-driven movies that were mostly as unpredictably dark as most of the producer-driven movies of yesteryear were reliably sunny.&nbsp;</div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: small;"><br /></div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: small;">But by the 80's, writers had so much experience writing for TV that they accumulated decades of wisdom for what works and what doesn't. TV was still mass produced, but the quality of it was much, much higher. Sitcoms with their canned laughter and schtick in place of jokes, were once considered the dumping ground for mediocrity - but with Newhart, Night Court, (gulp) The Cosby Show, The Wonder Years, Family Ties, Thirtysomething, Moonlighting, and especially Cheers, possessing virtuoso casts and writers who'd become seasoned pros, TV comedy became something more than it once was - a form of entertainment was beginning to be raised to an art as the great studio movies of yesteryear were. Even the laughtrack was omitted from some of them. A stable art that no matter how weird or occasionally fraught with conflict, upheld the importance of traditional values like family, friendship, romance, and the workplace nevertheless.&nbsp;</div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: small;"><br /></div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: small;">But there was, of course, another side to the 80's. What about all those people cut out of Reaganite prosperity? How were they represented? Representing scientists who saw their funding cut to nubs, there was Quantum Leap, which seemed to at least a few to represent the frustration of an era that first declared war on science.&nbsp; For the gay experience during their darkest decade, there was Pee-Wee's Playhouse, which was, unbelievably, a kids show because the only place where the camp that dare not speak its name could find a regular place for itself in mainstream entertainment.&nbsp; You had Hill Street Blues, a serialized police drama depicting the streets of an unnamed American cities with a handheld camera - the camera itself was literally as unstable as the material it covered. There was St. Elsewhere, a teaching hospital in a poor South Boston neighborhood seeing times harder than ever before in which the final episode is universally considered the most unpredictable moment in the history of television - I won't spoil it for those who don't know. But ultimately, the tremors mostly remained off-camera - swept under the rug.&nbsp; Quantum Leap exposed millions to the wonders of science's possibilities, but did nothing to explain how those wonders were being gutted. Even to those who understood Pee-Wee's true identity, it was a show which put the happiest possible face on a community that was dying by the thousands. And while both Hill Street Blues and St. Elsewhere were about urban blight, neither was told from the point of view of the blighted. In a few cases, it was told from the point of view of the blighter.</div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: small;"><br /></div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: small;"><br /></div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: small;">In the 90's TV got ten times still better. There is no question that The Simpsons, Seinfeld, Frasier, The Larry Sanders Show, Rosanne, Everybody Loves Raymond, Newsradio, Beavis and Butthead, Married with Children (yes, even Married with Children), The X-Files, Star Trek TNG and Deep Space Nine, My So Called Life, NYPD Blue, Picket Fences, were entertainment raised fully to the quality of art, some of it to the quality of timeless art. But virtually all of them were created as entertainment first, and any art put into them was mostly snuck in under the noses of the networks which broadcasted them.&nbsp;</div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: small;"><br /></div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: small;">For an ever so slightly more liberal era, many of them espoused values that were clearly more liberal than the great TV shows of the 80's. The new Star Trek franchise was not primarily about science, it was about politics - it was about the challenges of upholding a liberal order in the chaos of the wider universe - the galaxy itself became a parable for our world, and a beacon of inspiration that it was still possible to stay true to principles of improvement and justice when all about you is bellicosity. Frasier, for all it makes fun of its main character's pomp, took the intellectuality always on display in Cheers, amped it to the n'th degree, and displayed it on television as a true badge of honor. Everybody Loves Raymond, still one of the most misunderstood shows of all time, had the bravery to show that family values are worth upholding in part because families can be nightmarish prisons in which people who care about one another can tear one another to shreds - but that family is still a valuable institution because no matter how much a family hates each other at any given moment, they will still come through for one another as no one else will. NYPD Blue was utterly unashamed to portray its characters as something other than upholders of law and order, as sometime bigots who take out their hostility on the very people they're supposed to protect and defend. In the wake of the new Presidency, Rosanne may still prove the most relevant show of all - it displayed the frustrations and heartbreak of the forgotten working class and suggested that the prosperity of the American overclass, experiencing more prosperity than ever beore, forgot that some people were getting much poorer. Homicide, Life On the Street, the laboratory out of which David Simon grew The Wire, was ostensibly a police drama, but dared to tell nearly as many stories of the people protected and prosecuted in equal measure by the detectives. Beavis and Butthead was an unequivocal condemnation of its main character's idiocy.&nbsp;</div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: small;"><br /></div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: small;">But everybody knows that there were two shows that there were two shows that dominated the era like colossi, and set the stage for everything to come. They are, in all probability, the American literature of the age - the semi-sacred texts we always return to for wisdom and memory and ritual and comfort and it's so stupid to speak about them so pompously because Art was the last thing they were ever meant to be.&nbsp;</div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: small;"><br /></div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: small;">For my parents' generation, that show was Seinfeld. Seinfeld is the ultimate Baby Boomer show, and the show with which they came of age as the Masters of their Domain. It is an almost literally perfect show - as perfect in its way as Mozart piano concerto or a Raphael fresco. There may not be any particularly profound idea within it, but the perfection itself is a kind of profundity. In every twenty-two minute episode, four of the best performers on Earth immersed themselves in four separate story lines that would intersect at the end of the episode in a completely unexpected, but completely satisfying way. Forty-five years of the accumulated TV wisdom of writers, actors, cameramen, and production designers, built to this one show. &nbsp;</div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: small;"><br />In the half-hour sitcom, where compression is the key to it all, any emotional bond with the characters is dead weight, a place where the show wastes time being serious when there could be a joke in its place. There are many shows, good ones, where sitcom characters can be quite serious, but very few people would watch them if these characters did not also make them laugh. Far funnier, therefore, is to have an unlikeable character you can humiliate with their comeuppance, and since they're so unlikeable, they never learn their lesson, and they can be humiliated week after week. Comic characters cede a huge amount of their comedy if they grow, therefore, Larry David proposed the most inspired two rules of Seinfeld: No Learning, No Hugging. I occasionally think to myself that the truest progenitor of Seinfeld might be John Cleese's Fawlty Towers, in which Cleese plays a hotel operator of such pure bile that his continual humiliation is always completely deserved and completely satisfying.&nbsp;</div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: small;"><br /></div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: small;">Seinfeld was billed, still notoriously, as a show about nothing. Seinfeld was very much not a show about nothing. The Nothing, however, was how Seinfeld got away with the Somethings it was truly about. Seinfeld is about taboo - mentioning all those things one does not mention on TV because one does not mention them in polite company. Some of these taboos were a bit shocking in what they discussed in detail: masturbation, faking orgasms, bullemia, breast augmentation, blackface, stalking, stereotyping of immigrants, ogling teenagers, fetishizing Asian women, the possibility of turning gay men straight, even an allegory of date rape.<br /><br />Seinfeld began its airing during the tail end of the first Culture War, when figures in the conservative public intellectual industry like Alan Bloom, Roger Kimball, William Bennett, Norman Podhoretz, James Davison Hunter, Robert Bork, and of course Pat Buchanan and Newt Gingrich fought back against what they saw as the encroachment of liberal permissiveness against the bedrock conservative values that preserve a country from its decline - secular liberal values like abortion, contraception, recreational drug use, limitations on gun use, separation of Church from State, the right to be openly homosexual or transgender, lack of censorship. On the other side of this culture war were the figures of what began to be termed - political correctness. What was, until the late eighties, a Soviet term - usually conveyed in hushed tones - for an unobjectionably proper appointment of a functionary to a position of bureaucratic power - meaning that the potential appointee says nothing objectionable, does nothing objectionable, thinks nothing objectionable, will never challenge the official party line.<br /><br />Conservatives began to use it against as a pejorative, but it was taken up by certain more extreme figures of the academic left as a badge of honor. Most of the Baby Boomers moderated significantly in their politics, and became as militantly of the radical Left as their grandparents' professors had been militantly of the radical Right - academia, it would seem, forever gravitates to extremes. Even academic Marxism became somewhat passe, and after what might be termed the final generation of true American Marxists: Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky and Christopher Lasch and Fredric Jameson, considered by later thinkers to be hopelessly trapped in their white male privilege, the most important American theorists of the radical left - while no less savage toward capitalism - seemed to believe that the rather abstract idea of social class itself was a means by which one racial group or gender or sexuality continued to oppress another for not allowing for oppression within the oppression. Social class was considered utterly outmoded and monolithic and insufficient to explain the vagueries of oppressions' mechanisms. Ever new critical theorists emerged from academic journals with ever new theories of oppression with entirely new hierarchies and taboos: what the literary critic Harold Bloom referred to as the School of Resentment - at the front of the line was Edward Said with his theory of Orientalism which states that the very concept of the East in Western writers and all their attendant cultural observations were a means of oppressing ghettoizing those peoples not from the West, Judith Butler had theories about the oppression of binary gender, Andrea Dworkin about the oppression of pornography, Paul Goodman about the oppression of modern technology, Robert McChesney about the oppressiveness of media. The reading of critical theory text surpassed the reading of primary documents as the prime object of a humanities education on the university level - classic texts, be it fiction or poetry or history or philosophy, was implicated as former tools of oppression, and therefore, by and large outmoded at best, dangerous at worst.<br /><br />Are their theories correct or incorrect? Are their theories beneficial or dangerous? While the opinion of this caster is obvious by now, this is nevertheless not the place to ride these theories and their adherents too hard. What is undeniable though is the shockwaves sent by them through the life of America, and possibly through the life of the world. What has become clear over this quarter-century is that around 1990 second American religion was being born. A secular religion. A religion not unlike the Marxists and Communists of European yesteryear. A religion with as many orthodoxies and heresies to fight over as occurred when various forms of Christianity competed with one another for adherents and converts, and in the process created the traditional values which we now know as the dying 'Small Town America' values which culture warriors like William Bennett and Pat Buchanan still lead fights for along with whole new generations of culture warriors at their back. In this ascendent Age of the Internet, what once was an intellectual war fought on the pages of late-century intellectual journals is now a fight that takes place among millions, perhaps tens of millions, of laypeople of the internet - and threatens to turn into a kind of Civil War, a Holy War, and very much a violent war, over whether God or Social Justice is the most important element in American life. It is, most certainly, a one-sided war, in which the apparatus of power is entirely on the side of the traditional culture warriors, but because justice can never imposed on unjust people through peaceful action, social justice in the future will no longer be synonymous with peace activism - I am certain of it. The coming decades will harden them just as the democratic revolutionaries of 1848 were hardened into Marxist agitators for whom democracy was a horrifyingly messy process full of compromises and triage that had to be done away with. So if the world of 2016 is one for which the radical left agitates for peace, the inexorably coming tide against them will in all likelihood turn them by 2116 into something unrecognizably bellicose and authoritarian. Even standing toward the beginning of the historical process as we now are, we can perceive that what once was a rarefied academic war, incomprehensible to most, that had little if anything to do with the thriving, nihlistic, militantly undemanding, and exploitatively sensualist, popular culture that dominated American life of that late century American idyll which all of us over 30 remember so well - has become the prime motivator of contemporary American life in which taking a stand is virtually impossible to avoid. If the world's sole superpower has balkanized this much in twenty-five years, if the balkanization could not have been stopped by President Obama who talked so movingly in his first candidacy about how there is far more which unites us than divides us, how much more balkanized and hateful toward each other have we potential to become in the next 25 years?<br /><br /></div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: small;">It goes without saying that figures of both sides in the culture war were and remain scandalized by Seinfeld - albeit conservatives were far more vocal at the time. And yet, by being so reflective of an era that overturned taboos which existed for hundreds of years into trivialities, Seinfeld did as much as any cultural force in the world to create these new taboos of social justice about what cannot be mentioned in polite company - taboos which may last still more hundreds of years. Freedom is the most difficult and ephemeral concept in which people exist, and the vast majority of people will do what they can to place limitations on their freedom because individuality can be an inhuman burden to bear. Once an old heirarchy with its nittygritties and certain unmentionables are torn down, a new one will rise, inevitably and inexorably, almost as soon as the old one crumbles.&nbsp;</div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: small;"><br /></div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: small;">Seinfeld will not date well for the next few generations - I'm sure of that. More and more writers on the internet are professing offense at Seinfeld in a social justice manner that is entirely different from the manner in which the most vocal objectors, generally conservative, took offense at the time - some magazine journalists already are, and it is nothing less than a tribute to the show's subversive power. To the plurality of us in the midst of this culture war, liberal or conservative to varying extents but skeptical both about traditional sacred values and their radical upending, Seinfeld still seems like a revolutionary bomb launched into the propriety of people who want life to mean more it seems to mean. It is nothing less than a force of liberation. Certain things about it may date: the coded way which characters speak about the issues they discuss - 'master of your domain' in place of refraining to pleasure yourself, "refunding" in place of bullemia, 'shrinkage' to describe what penises do in cold water; do not seem shocking anymore, just an eccentric and perhaps pointless display of code. But Seinfeld's form is so ironclad that it works anyway in the context of the show's design, and will work just as easily in two-hundred years. What is liberating about Seinfeld in the age of Game of Thrones is that a show can shock so often and still be so light and joyful.<br /><br />It is difficult to recreate the shockwaves which so many Seinfeld episodes sent through American culture in the 90's. Seinfeld was merciless about addressing the taboos of the time, because they seemed to be asking us 'why are these taboos actually taboos?' And in the context of their era, it was entirely appropriate to ask. What the hell mattered to middle class white adults in the 90's? Their lives were so cut off from reality as most people live it - the suffering underclass of every race, the suffering of nearly every non-Western country, even the suffering which their American parents underwent to bring them to such privilege. To most people, life has consequence and matters because its continuance is not a given, but in 1990's America, it was very much a given, and there was nothing left to do but strip away those taboos which were once so significant in everyday life, but had long since turned into senseless trivialities. But what gave Seinfeld a far darker undertone is that even if life forces us to suffer more than four baby-boom-vaguely-Jewish-lower-upper-middle-class New Yorkers in the 1990's, does suffering make our lives mean more than they ever seemed to on Seinfeld? We have no proof that they do, and we have no proof that anything more verifiable is truly learned or felt in our lives than the very little that is learned or felt by the four lead characters of Seinfeld - all four of whom may very well have professed to liberalism then voted Trump.<br /><br />What makes Seinfeld brutal in retrospect is that we've learned all sorts of things since the 1990's, things that we cannot unlearn. But we, at least we the privileged, cannot ever be as joyful again as we were in the innocence of that era. We cannot turn back time to an era before all we learned from the Contract with America, the government shutdowns, Monicagate, Glass-Steagall's repeal, Bush v. Gore, 9/11, the Iraq Invasion, Abu Ghraib, Halliburton Contracts, Hurricaine Katrina, The 2008 crisis, The Great Recession, the difficulty of passing Obamacare, the realization that Pakistan was hiding Bin Laden for the better part of ten years, the police murders of countless African Americans, the urban riots of Ferguson and Baltimore, the difficulty of negotiating an international environmental emissions treaty or a peace treaty with Iran, or the nomination and election of this next occupier of the White House and all the horrors to come that may arise out of it. Surely so many bad things happened around the world in the more innocent era of the Reagans and the Clintons, but for whatever reason, we were not as aware of them - secure and innocent in our trivial bubbles of privilege.&nbsp;</div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: small;"><br /></div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: small;">We must remember, the Nineties was the Era of the End of History - which is the title of Francis Fukuyama's hugely influential neoconservative political science volume released in the wake of the Cold War's end which could have doubled as a thesis for why so many in the Bush Administration thought an Iraq invasion such a fantastic idea. The thesis of the book was that History has an end in both senses, that global conflict will now be a thing of the past, and that history has a purpose and a destiny, something resembling a live organism or a divinely mandated story that builds toward the realization that liberal democracy is the best of all possible governments. To Fukuyama, the arc of history is long, but it not only bends toward justice, but arrives there. Even if one agrees with the sentiment about liberal democracy, and I don't know how too many people can disagree, how idiotic those sentiments now seem and should have seemed at the time! And yet Fukuyama was not laughed at. Like all successful ideas, his thesis rose to the top of discourse because the thesis represented the national mood better than any other. To posterity, he is the great intellectual representative of his particular era, and like many intellectuals, he will in all likelihood be taken seriously by historians and philosophers and political scientists precisely because he was so wrong.&nbsp;</div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: small;"><br /></div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: small;">Seinfeld remains on in syndication seemingly eight times every day. People of a certain age still watch it religiously, endlessly reliving episodes that speak to them of their lives' zenith, when life seemed so endlessly prosperous and trivial and almost unbearably light. I wonder if, today, Baby Boomers do not look upon Seinfeld with a certain sadness and regret. Remembering their lives, remembering their country, remembering the Era of the End of History, when life was so relatively easy, and wondering how they could have not seen the warning signs of darker times to come. I think Milan Kundera put this problem best in a still reasonably famous quote from The Unbearable Lightness of Being if you can bare a gratuitous sexual intrusion of the type for which Kundera is truly notorious and which women may find offensive, my apologies in advance for his metaphor which is inappropriate for the matter at hand to the rest of the quote:</div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: small;"><br /></div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: small;">He says: "But is heaviness truly deplorable and lightness splendid? The heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink beneath it, it pins us to the ground. But in the love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man's body. The heaviest image is therefore simultaneously the image of life's most intense fulfillment. The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become. Conversely, the absolute absence of a burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into heights, to take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements are free as they are insignificant. What shall we then choose? Weight or lightness?"</div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: small;"><br /></div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: small;">I would add one sentence of my own to Kundera's somewhat famous quote: Our parents' generation chose lightness, therefore we are forced to choose weight.<br /><br />Seinfeld is a deceptively light show that stands in that long American tradition, the American Countersublime, in which lies all that great art whose truths are sufficiently horrifying that we wish we could run away from: in their various ways, they portray all that is dark, ignoble, shameful, contemptible, vile, and degenerate in human nature, in the American character, without offering us any redemptive humanity from its darkness, and once we encounter them, it's very difficult to escape the voyeuristic fascination they hold: Sleepy Hollow, The Tell Tale Heart, The Fall of the House of Usher, The Masque of Red Death, The Pit and the Pendulum, William Wilson, Dr. Heidegger's Experiment, Moby Dick, Billy Budd, Bartleby the Scrivener, The Turn of the Screw, The Devil's Dictionary, Birth of a Nation, The Tomb, The Tree, The Outsider, The Call of Cthulu, The Jungle, As I Lay Dying, Of Mice and Men, The Grapes of Wrath, Citizen Kane, Shadow of a Doubt, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, All About Eve, Sunset Boulevard, A Streetcar Named Desire, The Catcher in the Rye, A Good Man is Hard to Find, Rear Window, Invisible Man, The Searchers, Flowers for Algernon, Gypsy, Touch of Evil, Vertigo, North by Northwest, Psycho, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, Where The Red Fern Grows, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, Catch-22, The Bell Jar, Dr, Strangelove, In Cold Blood, Portnoy's Complaint, Patton, The French Connection, Dirty Harry, A Clockwork Orange, The Godfather, Deliverance, The Exorcist, Chinatown, Taxi Driver, Network, The Deer Hunter, Apocalypse Now, Sweeney Todd, Sophie's Choice, Little Shop of Horrors, Blood Meridian, Glengarry Glen Ross, American Psycho, Bonfire of the Vanities, GoodFellas, Assassins, The Silence of the Lambs, Unforgiven. And so many works, both TV and otherwise, of the 21st century, which we will talk about here in this series, clearly at great length. And yet, because the facets of nature they portray are so horrifying, they are necessary reminders of those dark crevasses of human nature which we wish we could avoid, but reminders that we need to find the strength at times to stoically bear life's dark side - and experiencing these works, which happen at the other side of a page or a screen, can be of enormous help. We are attracted back to these works like flies to a deadly hot light, like marble rye to a window. These are works about loathesome brutes, and yet we can't look away. So here's the miracle of Seinfeld, here's the miracle of Seinfeld - of all these works that offer no redemption, except for The Producers (and imagine if George Costanza is possible without either Max Bialystok or Leo Bloom), Seinfeld is perhaps the only one to offer the viewer any sort of respite from darkness, because it's told with such lightness and joy that the dark side of human nature can seem nothing but appealing.<br /><br />But if Seinfeld seems to take everything that's light about the American Experience and twist it into darkness, The Simpsons seems to take everything that's dark about the American Experience and transfigure it into light.<br /><br />The Simpsons are at least as crucial to our generation as Seinfeld is to our parents'...</div>Evan Tuckerhttps://plus.google.com/101333496816879280258noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5120202207964289878.post-24378777108318282392016-11-15T20:26:00.001-05:002016-11-15T21:20:23.582-05:001% Less Panic<div style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin-bottom: 6px;"><div style="font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; margin-bottom: 6px;"><div style="font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; margin-bottom: 6px;">OK. It took a week, but back to something at least resembling 1% of normal. Great and terrible predictions - which will inevitably be wrong. I'm still wholly pessimistic about the future of freedom and security (the two can only go together) in our sick country. I just think it's not going to break down just yet. The American system is stable enough that this is just the pre-echo of a true seizmic collapse, and I think the alt-right will be working towards undermining liberal institutions for the rest of our lives until they smash, and the moment they smash will be a magnified version of what we just experienced. Not to make light of it (though what else can we do...) but it's like Seinfeld says: "Breaking up is like knocking over a coke machine. You can't do it in one push. You gotta rock it back and forth a few times and then it goes over." To read the current mood of the country, think of 1890's.&nbsp;<span style="font-family: &quot;helvetica&quot; , &quot;arial&quot; , sans-serif; white-space: pre-wrap;">Every major country in the world was rocked by internal conflict and radicalism, every state clamped down on the rights of its citizens, every state exploited workers still more mercilessly, all of which reinforces each other and sets the stage for the grand finale of an age. </span>It's still horrible, but it's not 100 million people thrown into a meat processor.</div><div style="font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; margin-bottom: 6px; margin-top: 6px;">But to move these historical comparisons around a bit... We had one rock with the Bush administration, a McKinley like figure who plutocratized government and bullied smaller countries into wars. The country was traumatized enough by it that they skipped over a Teddy Roosevelt-like figure (someone who keeps the bellicosity but reforms the plutocracy - McCain?) to elect Obama - who is very much a Woodrow Wilson-like figure (odd how Wilson becomes persona non grata to left-of-center people at the very moment his true successor appears) - an acme of progressivism for his time, a fervent believer in soft power and negotiation, the creator of a rough draft what eventually has to, and will, be adopted, if only for a time. No World War I under Obama though. The second rock, still more dramatic, will be Trump - a man of Harding's incompetence and Coolidge's unwillingness to govern. Fortunately, eight years, let us hope only four, of Trump will not bring us a permanent dictatorship, but it will probably bring us a depression in which the economy must be utterly restructured, which, thanks to automation, was probably coming anyway. Hopefully, the environment will hold out until some administration and legislature can restructure everything the way government did in the days of Lincoln and Roosevelt, but the only way you can truly restructure the world is when there's a disaster to precipitate the restructuring.&nbsp;<span style="font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;">On the other hand, if there's an environmental disaster after government is restructured. or if the debt ceiling collapses, or if just a moderate portion of the debt itself is recalled, in a more progressive, socialist, fashion, the entire system of government we have could collapse right as it starts to work as liberals and people left of us always hoped it would. Or, perhaps it's the luck of the draw and an economic depression will give us something still worse than Trump - a competent Trump</span>.</div><div style="font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; margin-bottom: 6px; margin-top: 6px;">The Twenty-First Century just began, and it'll be a ride like any other historical period folks. It will get worse, but I still think it will get worse gradually and only explode when our children are our age. We all may be able to enjoy ourselves on the way down..., and for those who make it to the other side, they'll know what it is like to experience hope again. We salute you.</div><div style="display: inline; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; margin-top: 6px;">Of course, I could be wrong. Most of this probably is: "If it be now, ’tis not to come. If it be not to come, it will be now. If it be not now, yet it will come—the readiness is all."</div></div></div>Evan Tuckerhttps://plus.google.com/101333496816879280258noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5120202207964289878.post-14129784904316372982016-11-15T01:30:00.006-05:002016-11-17T01:48:21.794-05:00Tales From the Old New Land: Tale 4 - Just Steve (94 %)<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And having a playback memory, Carmen remembered something about copying down everything he said that sounded vaguely like a reference to Isaiah 8:1, and recorded every word of what he said for fear that he'd demand of her why she did not comply with the order he gave mid-binge/tirade to record these pearls of wisdom. In fact, she did it immediately after he let her go from the ledge. She kept a copy of it on her person every day of her life, in case the Producer ever returned and demanded to see it.</span></div><span id="docs-internal-guid-091f4024-a147-1ba2-0aae-f70cf612e448" style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Producer and Carmen slugged on after that night for another sixteen months. When Carmen finally became Steve's, she was more radiantly beautiful than ever before for two whole decades, and considering the dangers she'd passed, one could argue that she was still more beautiful inside than out. Nevertheless, her ribs had the consistency of crushed ice, her joints bent in manners no human being should, the simple act of arising from her bed was pain itself. Among those who'd experienced repetitive trauma, it is not uncommon to deal with the constant rebreaking of bones, degenerative disc disease and an eventual lumbar spinal fusion; bone spurs, torn ligaments, degenerative arthritis, staff infections from corrective surgeries. And that's only from the effects from before he started to hit her face.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This is mercifully not a story in which to discuss the particulars of tyrannical behavior which cause such internal horror. This narrator has neither the patience nor nothing like the fortitude to speak in any more than generalities about the abominations perpetrated upon Carmen and he beseeches your forgiveness for his need to speak any further of these depravities. But if this fictional rendering of a single Hollywood player getting off on the scent of blood has anything like the ring of veracity to you, then he asks you to at least consider how many thousands there may have been over the past century of powerful Hollywood men who've acted precisely like this.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This particular apparition of a Producer knew on the night of this "window dressing" (his charming term for what transpired that dawn) that his days as a respected Hollywood player could be counted with two digits. Don't mind us the circumstances of his ignominy, there were any number of risible cinematic bombs in the late 70's and early 80's which wiped out Hollywood producers, production companies, and whole studios:</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">There was At Long Last Love, Peter Bogdanovich's trivial homage to 30's movie-musicals, Cole Porter songs, and Ernst Lubitsch romantic comedies - because nothing oozes Golden Age Hollywood class quite like Burt Reynolds, who became a superstar a few years previously when Deliverance allowed us to watch him kill a Georgia hillbilly with a crossbow while the hillbilly sodomized a 300 pound Ned Beatty as Ned's ordered to squeal like a pig. There was The Exorcist II: The Heretic, a shameless money grab of a sequel starring a miserable looking Richard Burton during a period when he looked like he was taking parts in horrible movies just so he could pay his astronomical bar tab. There was The Swarm, a horror movie about killer bees that starred Michael Caine, Henry Fonda, Richard Widmark, and Olivia de Havilland - because what everybody wanted to see in the late 70's was the biggest stars of 1945 in a horror movie with a plot too absurd for Roger Corman to film. There was I Spit On Your Grave - a film that couldn't even find distribution for two years because of its quarter-hour depictions (notice the plural) of gang rape. There was X-rated Caligula, a movie made through the combined talents of literary lion Gore Vidal and Bob Guccione - publisher of Penthouse Magazine, who simply wanted to record a literal rendering of the depraved events within the Roman Emperor Caligula's palace in Tacitus's Annals. Every imaginable degradation seemed to find its way into the script; raping a bride on her wedding day - and her groom, sex shows involving children and the deformed (if you don't believe me, watch it), gladiatorial public execution, and a confusing scene for which poor Helen Mirren has to use what is hopefully a prosthetic vaginal cavity to depict herself giving birth as part of a (literally) execrable performance within all these execrable performances. After seeing the original cut, Guccione decided that audiences weren't getting their money's worth, and insisted on inserting a forty-five minute bisexual orgy near the end which the Roman Senators and their wives are coerced into having.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">There was, of course, Heaven's Gate, which lost 30 million dollars, ran to nearly four hours in original cut, deliberately killed a horse with explosives, was yanked from movie theaters after less than a week, and bankrupted United Artists - according to most experts the greatest of all movie studios - forever. Some swear it's a misunderstood masterpiece, this narrator doesn't want to find out... Of course, it has a ten minute rape scene...</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">There was Inchon, the B-Movie hagiography for America's Five-Star General in Asia, and for a moment in 1952 America's would-be dictator, Douglas MacArthur. Financed with no expense spared by a combination of the United States Military and world's most infamous cult leader, the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, with MacArthur played by the world's greatest actor - the ailing Lord Lawrence Olivier - for a cool million bucks, and directed by Terrance Young, who made the first few James Bond movies. MacArthur's closest confidante was played by Richard Roundtree, the original Shaft. Who'd have conceived that a movie of such disparate parts would come unglued?</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">There was Tarzan, the Ape Man - in which a mythical White Ape turns out to be a white man raised by apes and therefore must be brought back to civilisation in England where he can be taught proper discourse. Nevertheless, he retains the animal sexual magnetism of Africa, which overwhelms poor proper and prim Jane. Tarzan's character was found offensive by some in the 1910's when he first appeared, imagine the reception by 1981. Yet somehow, there've since been another six Tarzan movies.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And who can, or should, forget George Lucas's Howard the Duck? A PG live-action movie in which a loveable alien duck gets transported through a wormhole to our world. In the course of the movie, he gets dumped by a club bouncer into a hot tub where a couple is having sex, a human that turns out to be an alien who has a tongue that seems to extend like an erection in the presence of Lea Thompson, Howard's duckbill attempts to bite the ass of a sixty-something black woman whose onion-like posterior he finds quite stimulating, he excitedly opens Playduck Magazine in which we see a photo of a duck with curves and hair and feathered white nipples (later in the movie we see duck boobies with pink human nipples), the Cleveland Police Department sexually assaults Howard the Duck, and actor Jeffrey Jones (himself now a convicted sex offender) walks in on Lea Thompson seducing Howard the Duck.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And, of course, Ishtar. The only of these risible and bank-busting movies directed by a woman, and the only one whose director never directed a movie again. Perhaps Ishtar was, truly, the last movie of the Old-New Hollywood - directed by Mike Nichols's old comic partner Elaine May, Dustin Hoffman and Warren Beatty starring, Vittorio Storaro (Coppola and Bertolucci's cinematographer of choice) doing the photography, co-starring New Hollywood luminaries like Tess Harper who was Robert Duvall's wife in Tender Mercies, Charles Grodin who grew up in an Orthodox family, Jack Weston who was once Jack Weinstein, Carol Kane who played Woody's first wife in Annie Hall and an Oscar nominee for a part in Hester Street that she acted entirely in Yiddish, an Israeli named Aharon Ipale, Fred Melamed who is best known for his portrayal of Sy Ableman in A Serious Man, and David Margulies who was practically Hollywood's character actor of choice when you needed a Jew. Is it any wonder that a film bombed that had so many Jews involved whose scenario was in an Arab country? </span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Something rotted in that air of freedom which made the New Hollywood Golden Age possible. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. It was inevitable that the freedom which allowed for realistic depictions of ordinary people with their ugliness intact, with sex, and violence, and emotional turmoil unshielded by a production code, would curdle into freedom's betrayal by making its depictions into something sickeningly exploitative - sometimes freedom's very liberators betrayed it. In the case of Hollywood, what appeared to be a glorious liberation turned out to be merely another swing of the pendulum that landed on equilibrium for a moment before swinging into decadence. Today's Hollywood has a new production code, a code that allows for rivers of blood so long as the violence is confined to an unrealistic genre and its human consequences softpedaled, a code that allows for the naive innocence of children to continue unabated into adulthood with bro comedies about manchildren, a code which only allows romantic comedies in which love's ugly moments are airbrushed out of existence, a code dominated by action movies for which the stars are the special effects. Just as in the old production code, today's Hollywood movies can still be damn good, but in the opinion of this clearly not humble enough narrator, almost none of them show us ourselves. There are ways around the problem - movies like The Social Network and Her and WALL-E and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which only show us a complex image of the human spirit by showing us how technology may have completely reshaped it; or movies like Boyhood or the Before movies or (believe it or not) Borat, in all of which the experimental gimmick that makes them possible is so radically extreme that they can only be done once and never be copied. There are some very fine and human directors working in Hollywood's orbit if not actually 'in' Hollywood: there are at least two American treasures: Alexander Payne and Richard Linklater, both of whom manage in every movie to say something new and elusive about America. Among the 'tribe', there's Jason Reitman, or at least was, who made three of the great American movies at the beginning of his career with Thank You For Smoking, Juno, and Up In The Air, all three of which manage to say something new and elusive about America, and there's John Sayles, whom nobody remembers anymore, but twenty years ago was the God of Independent American Film. There's Ang Lee, who isn't even American, but easily beats Americans at their own game. And of course, there's Errol Morris, the documentarian who makes movies so utterly different from everyone else's that you shouldn't even call them movies by the accepted definition. </span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Other than them, there are, as Woody once called them, the Academy of the Overrated: Tarantino, the Coen Brothers, David Lynch, PT Anderson, Wes Anderson (whom in all fairness seems to be improving), Spike Jonze, Charlie Kaufmann, David Fincher, Christopher Nolan, Steven Soderbergh (who at least tries to be more ambitious), Sofia Coppola, Peter Jackson, Ken Burns (it takes a rare talent to make the subjects of his documentaries boring), David O Russell, the Wachowskis, Gus Van Sant, Tim Burton, James Cameron... </span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">These are directors so enamored of movies that they jam pack their movies with references to other movies and forget to put references to life in them. Perhaps that statement is unfair, there are exceptions in every one of their outputs, but the exceptions are very few compared to the misfires. There is a kind of ersatz profundity to their movies - movies like The Matrix and Inception and Avatar and I Heart Huckabees (a movie I used to love) with philosophical messages that can fit inside a fortune cookie; a ponderousness which PT Anderson mistakes for profundity, an incomprehensibility which Charlie Kaufmann mistakes for intellectual challenge, a cynical darkness which David Fincher and the Coen Brothers mistake for gravity, an arrested development which Tim Burton and Wes Anderson mistaken for whimsy, a reliance on CGI which Christopher Nolan and the Wachowskis and James Cameron mistake for visual artistry (because in their movies, it's the technicians who are the artists, not the director), a reliance on other movies which Tarantino and David Lynch mistake for ironic commentary. In each of these cases, the problem is that they're weighted down by the baggage of movie history. The movies before them were simply too good, so rather than try to compete with them catharsis for catharsis, they dodge the challenge and instead create homages to what older masters did better than they did, and many critics call these postmodern homages 'original' when the only thing that's original about them is their lack of emotional demand on the audience. These are movies about movies, and therefore perhaps they're movies against movies. Most alarmingly, and prevalent to nearly all of them, are the movies that mistake technology for humanity. Even among the directors unaddicted to CGI, there are more breathtaking shots in today's American movies than ever before. If nature doesn't give you the background you want, if the lighting on some actress's face is not quite what you want, if her jawline is not quite the way you'd like it, you can digitally alter it to any specification you like; but to what end? Today's auteurs have utterly mastered the technical end of filmmaking, and perhaps because we've mastered technique, we've forgotten what the technique is for. &nbsp;</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Meanwhile, people who've devoted their whole lives to film tell us that the world is experiencing a cinematic Golden Age of which the United States is the only first world country who remains excluded. As with so many things about Contemporary America - soccer, news, public transit, languages, condoms, history, black humor, cheap health care, gun laws, and vegetables - we have in America only the dimmest awareness of the feast that often seems to happen in every corner of the globe but ours because we're too busy playing with our toys. </span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Special effects are the new stars of Hollywood. The highest grossing movies are no longer character based movies like The Godfather or Bonnie and Clyde or Midnight Cowboy or Easy Rider or American Graffiti or Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid or The Sting or One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest or MASH or Fiddler on the Roof or Patton. There were plenty of smaller, character driven films during these years that did well, but it was between 1975 and 1990 that technology become the undisputed box office king, and after that came the systematic gutting of movies that portrayed Americans in their natural state in anywhere but independent film and the Miramax ghetto. Just over the other side of 1975 lay the Star Wars Trilogy and Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Indiana Jones and ET and Back to the Future and Roger Rabbit - and how human and full of personality do those early Spielberg and Lucas and Zemeckis movies seem next to the high-grossing movies of our time! Would it surprise anyone that Tom Cruise or Chris Hemsworth or Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson were actually computer programs or robots that only exist on a screen? There was even an Al Pacino movie about that exact notion fifteen years ago called Simone. Maybe Jennifer Lawrence is just an updated Simone, an indication that these computer avatars have improved to the point that seem so like us humans that perhaps humans are indistinguishable now from robots!</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This New New Hollywood came into existence because the knowledge that movies like Caligula and I Spit On Your Grave and Heaven's Gate and Howard the Duck gave us of what we were capable of was too terrible. The freedom to create greater and more uplifting spectacles can also give us things too vile and revolting for contemplation. All it took was less than a dozen movies in which the human animal was presented to us undeniably in all its stinking shit, and the movie world's been running away from its truth ever since.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Our dearly beloved Producer could have been working on any of these movies, it doesn't matter which, but by the same time the next year, The Producer hadn't worked on a movie for nine months; nine months during which his fists literally performed an abortion on Carmen. Perhaps it became his sole source of satisfaction and relief, because for six months, no glamorous friend returned a call, relieving him not only of his own glamor but the sycophants who glommed onto it. Friendship is fleeting, love mere folly, but how much more true would that be when living in a place known as the 'Dream Factory?' But f</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">ive minutes after every time he went off, he begged her not to leave, just you wait, he'll make you happy again, Hollywood can be something better than its ever been, and you'll be its leading lady!</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Then there was the time the Producer bruised her father up after her father asked about Carmen's bruises. Two minutes later, he gave her Dad a $10,000 wad of cash, then drove him to the emergency room personally in his 1977 Lamborghini Countach. The moment he got through the door, he took out more wads of cash for the doctor and nurses and the other patients - they saw nothing. And while they were in the ER, Carmen's sister practically kidnapped her to a courthouse to make her get a restraining order. Carmen was unwilling, worried she was about to get killed. If not by her producer, then by the guys he'd pay to keep her quiet. The judge listened very patiently and carefully and evinced great compassion for her suffering, he then excused himself to his chamber for five minutes, came back and refused the restraining order. Twelve minutes later, the Producer was at the courthouse, gave Carmen a huge hug and kiss as she sobbed her tears upon him, took her home and told her over and over again how much he loved her. Two days later, they were engaged, and she was the one who wanted to go to the courthouse right away; but he promised her a wedding the whole world would know about, the wedding she deserved.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Who could turn down the life he promised? This was a man who knew how to turn the curvature of the Earth to the precise angle he wanted. He was the best actor in Hollywood. For more than a decade, he dealt with creative geniuses every day of his life, but he was a genius of life itself. Every event, the most glamorous, the most spiritual, the most transcendent, the most intangible, could be picked apart and reduced to a transaction. Nothing in life was a mystery to him, and all he demanded in return was that she be no more complicated to understand than the concierge in Oviedo.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Even so, no matter how much of a genius he was, in order to have that wedding, he had to be back in the good graces of Hollywood, and in order to return to Hollywood's graces, he had to be in the graces of multinationals who bought Hollywood up.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It was just at this moment that our dear Producer, whose tastes in cuisine had always seemed tending to the upscale LA specialties of shellfish, steak, and sushi, seemed to develop a yen for rouladen, kasespatzle, saurbraten, kartoffelknodel, bretzels and wurst. Carmen had no idea why the Producer wanted them to go for German every night, and of course he wouldn't explain except to say that there was a different dish he wanted them to try. One night at Old World German Restaurant, the next at Van Nuys German Deli (a standup counter place for which he still insisted that Carmen wear heels), the next at Alpine Village, and the same rotation every night for five or six weeks. Within a month, the Producer was a good twenty pounds heavier, but the moment Carmen's dress seemed a bit tighter, the Producer did what he could to make her not finish what he ordered for them. She would wrap the remains up and take home what remained in a doggie bag, then find them missing from the fridge the next morning.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">About five to six weeks in, the Producer pointed to a table across the restaurant. "That's Karlheinz von Huntze, Executive Vice-President of Polygram Entertainment." Until the 60's, Polygram was a third-German, third-Dutch, third-British corporation responsible for no less than seven of the world's major classical music labels and another ten of the world's major Popular Music labels. A number of these labels were all too happy to collaborate with Hitler's culture ministers in times gone by, but Polygram controlled a vast swath of the great musical glories of the gramophone - glories set down before, during, and after the Second World War: Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Earl Hines, Dizzy Gillespe, Woody Herman, Charlie Parker, Bill Evans, Stan Getz, Oscar Petersen, Lester Young, Billie Holiday, Eartha Kitt, untold numbers of Broadway Musicals, Patsy Cline, Loretta Lynn, George Jones, the Rolling Stones and Elvis during some of their best periods, Eric Clapton, Talking Heads, the Ramones, KISS, Billy Joel, Donna Summer, the Village People, the Bee Gees, ABBA, The Osmonds, Yves Montand, Jacques Brel, Edith Piaff, and hundreds of other pop music acts; nearly every major mid-century orchestral conductor, untold numbers of great classical soloists and opera singers and chamber ensembles, the premiere recordings of every postwar work by Benjamin Britten and Ralph Vaughan Williams, untold numbers of moderately obscure and young and unproven composers whom no major label today would take a chance on, the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, the Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam, the London Symphony Orchestra, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra... In 1963, it was Polygram's by then long since subsidiary, the Dutch Phillips Electronics (founded by Karl Marx's uncle), that invented the tape cassette.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">By 1980, Polygram was surely too big to fail, and yet... its catalogue was simply too large, and it had to either expand significantly to make up for its losses, or shed an enormous part of its product. Since there was very little in music of which they didn't own a significant portion, it was time to move into Movies. What better way to do that than Movie Musicals? Polygram had a 50% share in RSO Records, which gave them a huge profit in the Disco market because RSO Records had the music distribution rights to Grease and Saturday Night Fever. This was in addition to the money made from their contracts with the Bee Gees and the Village People and Donna Summer. Unfortunately, this was nowhere near enough to cover their bill. They needed a movie musical of their own.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Enter Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band... THE MUSICAL! Yes, all the Beatles hits are here, sung as you've always wanted to hear them sung by Peter Frampton, the Bee Gees, and Steve Martin. With cameos from Aerosmith, Alice Cooper, Earth Wind &amp; Fire, Dr. John, Etta James, Curtis Mayfield, Bonnie Raitt, Frankie Valli, and a hundred other musicians - none of which sing their original music, and narrated by George fucking Burns (now there's a name that'll put the young asses in the seats...). God knows how many hundreds of millions Polygram had to pay to acquire the rights for them from EMI, but it was just another couple hundred million pulled down the drain of this spectacular musical black hole. Ever the artistes, John and George refused to even attend the premiere, no doubt they took the money though; while ever the workhorses, Paul and Ringo went to the premiere, then refused to have anything more to do with the movie, or with Polygram.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And there sits Karlheinz von Huntze, all sixty-seven years and 350 pounds of him squeezed into a fecally brown suit that probably fit him when he was fifty-five with a badly tied thin tie that didn't reach his naval, unashamed of his brown teeth and double chin that went past his neck, all of which bit with great begeisterung into the giant plate of braten and sauerkraut in front of him, yet vain enough about his hair to wear a spectacularly bad salt and pepper toupee whose base seemed to levitate an inch and a half over his boneless skull and continue six inches up. On his left hand, a wedding ring seems as though it might at any moment pop off his brat-like finger.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So this was it... The perfect movie musical star - a gorgeously unique looking petite girl with a large head, already well known and liked by everybody in Hollywood, packed to the gills with brains and lungs; no singing lessons necessary, no acting lessons necessary, minimal dancing, can play piano, knows every jazz standard in the Real Book. All it takes is one movie, then she has her choice - greatest living singer or greatest living actress? It's needless to say who's on her arm and advising her every decision.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And of course, she's brilliant when she talks to Huntze. Within ninety seconds, the Producer excuses himself to the bathroom and seems to stay in there for forty minutes. She speaks to him in the fluent German she picked up from her opera training, they compare the Schubert and Goethe they love best, they sing the Papageno and Pamina duet from Mozart's Die Zauberflote at the table (the restaurant bursts into applause, more for Carmen...). He orders four different deserts, and insists on splitting each of them with her and that she eat up her half to the every mouthful. He gives her a standing invitation to visit him and his wife in Hamburg so she can see the Kunsthalle and the Dichterhallen and walk through the taverns where the young Brahms played, and tells her that he'd love to hear her play piano before he leaves town. He writes down an address of a private residence of a freund at who's place he's staying.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Of course, very little piano was played. Someone already as thoroughly demoralized as Carmen has no illusions left of the necessities expected of her. If anything, she was thankful for Herr Huntze's patronizing kindness. The cutesy/schatzi German nicknames he gave her, the grandfatherly forcefeeding of Stroh and Obstwasser before geschlechtich verkehren and makronen afterward (which of course came to her mouth via his boneless hand). He told her she was a shoo-in, all she had to do was meet with a few more people at Polygram and they'd make a musical as a vehicle for her! </span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It is, of course, needless to tell you that something similar was expected at every new meeting with every member of the Polygram team: Germans, Austrians, Swiss, Dutch, Danish... Old world gentlemen all of them, their courtly manners justifying their sense of entitlement to the world. A few of them were quite attractive - tall, silver-haired gentlemen with immaculately tailored three-piece suits surrounding dark paisley ties or ascots tucked into perfectly pressed shirts; sculpted hair and pencil-thin mustaches above the thin and constantly pursed lips that smoked long thin cigarettes; they wore scarves in the summer and walked with ornate canes - even the young ones seemed old. The bald ones generally had combovers with more mousse than hair, the fat ones always had watch chains on their vests. Never would she leave without an extremely expensive gift - a Channel perfume, a Swarovski Chocolate Box, a De Beer diamond ring, a dress from Christian Dior (and of course, the measurements were perfect). When meeting her at the door they would bend down and kiss her on the hand, or kiss her on each cheek, sometimes three times rather than two. Conversation was always quite pleasant, the meals were always the height of gourmet and gourmand, the wines they picked were amazing (at least when they weren't German...), and occasionally they even flew her to Germany. Karlheinz even got her to the Dichterhallen.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Producer seemed strangely OK with all this. He never asked her where she was going, gave her free use of whatever car she wanted, and he seemed happier than he'd ever been in their relationship. He was on the phone 18 hours a day, his old friends were his friends again, and during that month when she was in meetings and gaining nearly thirty pounds from all the decadent dishes she'd eaten - which made outfits much tighter and her curves still more alluring - his life was back to a whirlwind of tennis, power lunches, movie pitches from him, and movie pitches to him.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Early in the evening of September 19th, which they both vaguely remembered in the back of their minds was Kol Nidrei Night, Carmen returned to the house to find every light in the house on, the mirrors covered, the unshaven Producer wearing what looked like a white bathrobe and a fisherman's cap on his head, but all of the cap but the bill was covered by a blindingly white shawl with blue stripes over his head. Carmen knew that it was obviously a tallis, but her Producer never gave any indication of being so Orthodox to wear one that long. He was standing in the corner of his living room, his back to the wall, bending his torso up and down at the speed of sound as he read from a black book while his lips moved with barely any sound at all at the speed of light. He didn't even seem to notice her, and as she walked in his line of vision, she saw that not only was he wearing his favorite tie, but the tie was cut in the middle, almost the entire way through.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Before she could even ask what was wrong, he looked at her and emphatically intoned:</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">"Vahyigah hadawvawr el meylekh nineveh mikis'aw va'yo'aw'ver ahdahrtaw meyawlawv."</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And then he began to walk directly towards her, staring her deadly cold in the eye and taking a step a few inches forward with every seven words:</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">"For the word came unto the King of Nineveh and he arose from his throne and he laid his throne from him and covered him with sackcloth and sat in ashes and he caused it to be proclaimed and published through Nineveh by the decree of the King and his nobles saying let neither man nor beast nor herd nor flock taste any thing let them not feed nor drink water but let man and beast be covered with sackcloth and cry mightily unto Adonai yea let them turn every one from his evil way and from the violence that is in their hands."</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">He then stared at his hand for a moment that seemed like fifteen, as unaware as she was about what he was about to do.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">"You didn't get the part."</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And then he dislodged her cornea.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">-----------------------------------------------------</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This is the last we will ever say of the particulars of physical abuses perpetrated upon Carmen, and while he can make no promises, the narrator very much hopes that this is the last time he feels the need to elucidate any details of gendered violence in what will hopefully become a mega/meta-novel that takes decades to write for many, many hundreds of pages, if ever. We do, however, have to speak rather lengthily about the repercussions of what was perpetrated upon Carmen, but fortunately, the details of that will proceed organically from the story - with some digressions of course...</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">"Of course you can stay at my place. However long you need to. I hope you don't mind though, my housemate has a friend staying on our sofa but my room has a foldout couch."</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Steve lets Carmen in, they walk into his room, she sees the 250 books on his shelves, she sees the violin case on the fold-out couch, she sees the projector screen covering the window and the projector at the far end of the room with a pile of classic movie canisters as tall as she is; the proverbial cat is out of the bag and she breaks down weeping. Steve holds Carmen to console her, but he has no idea what he's consoling, and while he asks, he's not about to push the matter.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">When Carmen finally feels better, she walks over to the canisters, picks out Casablanca, and for two hours they lie down and decide that the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world... It's a Monday night. On Tuesday, they watch The Best Years of Our Lives. On Wednesday, It's A Wonderful Life. Thursday, City Lights. Friday, It Happened One Night. Saturday, &nbsp;The Philadelphia Story. Sunday, Steve finally shows her his favorite movie: Sunrise; meaning not that his favorite movie is somewhere between a pretentious statement about nature and a pickup line, but Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans, the 1927 masterpiece co-awarded the first ever Best Picture Oscar (even in the first year of the Oscars they could award it all to the best movie...) and a movie that should reduce every living being to a puddle of feelings by its end. It was directed by F.W. Murnau, a young German moviemaker recently immigrated to the United States, who might have proven greater than either Hitchcock or Welles had a car accident not claimed him four years later.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">On this, Steve and I completely agree, Sunrise is more than a simply great film. To me it is, next to Citizen Kane, nothing less than the cornerstone of all movies ever made in this country. The dawn at the end of Sunrise is not simply a metaphor for the dawn of a reinvigorated rural marriage, it is a metaphor for the American dawn, for the dawn of movies themselves, for the dawn of witnessing art enacted for us by our fellow humans on a durable screen rather than in our imaginations from a flimsy piece of paper; for the dawn of a modern era when the hope of the New World emerges from the despair of the Old - for the passing of the torch from a world that once coveted Northern European ideals like civilization, education, and culture, to a world that coveted American ideals like life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Perhaps these new ideals will prove equally unfulfillable to the old ones, but not yet at least, and while there's no doubt that it's hokey to say that the Sun rose on a new day with this movie, it's no less true for being hokey.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It's probably worth mentioning that some night after one of these movies, they have sex for the first time, and perhaps nearly as importantly, Steve has sex for the first time; this era was a few years before it became a given that 95% of students would lose their virginity by the end of college. I'd like to say that they first did it after they watched "It Happened One Night," but that is much too on the nose...</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Steve, like most men, particularly most young men who've never had sex before, has no idea what might cause women discomfort, even if it might seem obvious to them in distant retrospect. It somehow never occurred to him that even a woman as intelligent as Carmen might dislike a movie in which a man who attempts to work up the nerve to drown his pure, Aryan-looking country wife (you can tell how innocent she is by her long blond hair wrapped in a tight bun) so he can take up full time with his knowing city tramp of a mistress with a nose slightly too large to not escape a semitic connotation, but if that's not enough to get the point, you can tell how 'knowing' she is from her black hair cut into a flapper haircut...), whom he also tries to kill when she suggests killing his wife to him - but </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">both times, being the splendidly ethical man he is at heart, </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">he manages to stop himself, and after his nearly killing the two women closest to him in twenty minutes, he resolves to redeem himself because of the purity of his wife's being and sufferance in his ignoring her, his wandering eye, and his bad mind for business that puts their country farm in danger. </span><br /><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">After he stands over her, his hands lurched outward in the manner of exaggerated silent movie murderousness as he attempts to work up the murderous nerve to throw her overboard from a canoe on a lake, she waits for her coward of a husband to row back ashore so she can abscond to a bus heading to the city, and he runs after her, begging her not to be afraid of him. She can't escape the iron grip of a husband a foot taller and wider in frame, and as he holds onto her, they wander into a city church, and they watch and listen as a clearly Lutheran priest officiates an expensive city wedding and intones from a cue card "God is giving you in the holy bonds of matrimony, a trust. She is young... and inexperienced. Guide her and love her... ...keep and protect her from all harm. Wilt thou LOVE her?" At which point this wayward, murderous hulk of a man becomes a teary and dewy eyed portrait of remorse who collapses into the lap of his suffering wife like Jesus in a pieta consoled by the Virgin Mary. Because what clearly matters is the husband's suffering, not the wife's.</span><br /><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And if that's not enough to make the Carmens of this world cringe, there's then the moment in the beauty parlor, when the wife runs away in horror from a barber with the temerity to try to take her hair out of its virginal bun - her purity thankfully intact. Then there's the set piece with another 'knowing floozy' who tries to give the husband a manicure, suggestively pulling his hand out from underneath the barber's smock, only for him to swat away her ministrations to his wife's all-consuming relief. A moment later, when an upper-class man tries to get fresh with this innocent country wife and breaks off one of the flowers bought her by her husband to put into his lapel, the husband emerges from under the barber's smock, freshly shaved, and this so recently almost murderer draws a pocket knife, only to nip the flower off as the gentleman covers his neck with his hand, clearly certain that the husband was about to give him what the OJ Simpson defense team called the Colombian Necktie. </span><br /><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And yet, amid all this psychotic violence is the simple story of a married couple falling back in love with one another by experiencing a new facet of life - an innocent rural couple, firmly fastened to the prison of country life's slowness that's caused so much desperation and longing in modern literature, arriving in the bustle and activity of the city to find the life and action for which they ache, and arrive at that perverse balance between the innocence of children and the tragic knowledge of adulthood's sacrifices that is romance - that bond we all seek, the eternal spring of life's being, the fleeting moments we wish are forever, when life as must happen disappears and all that remains is life as we wish it to be. And yet in order for life to occur as we wish it to be, life must be disappointing enough to form our wishes. </span><br /><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And after bits with a drunk pig, impossible to explain, accidentally breaking the head off a statue during some horseplay, making out in what the emotion seems to transform a crowded thoroughfare into the Garden of Eden, and then drunkenly making out as flying angels form ring around them, shortly before which the husband wants to beat up yet another upper-class twit for suggesting that the couple do a country dance for a large city crowd - which they do to the city dweller's eruptive delight. </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">They sail home by moonlight, 'a second honeymoon' the wife calls it with all the literalness of a pure country girl, her errant husband, who nearly drowned her on the same boat that morning, as in love as he probably was on their first honeymoon. She falls into blissful sleep upon his chest, and he gently places the lapel of his jacket over her face, in twelve hours, turning into good husband again who protects his wife. </span><br /><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">But in these days before doppler radar, a frenzied storm erupts as suddenly as the moonlight seemed eternal but </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">a moment ago</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">. Even the city dwellers duck for cover. The calmness of the lake upon which they live turns into a roaring sea, as the pure and terrified country wife holds onto her husband for dear life, preventing him from doing the rowing necessary to save them.</span><br /><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">The desperate husband wakes the whole town up and forms a search party on the lake. She survives by holding onto a bundle of bamboo picked and placed into the boat by his mistress - but not before he tries to kill his mistress yet again, this time, nearly succeeding, and we're half-rooting for him to be successful! But a figure who is probably the wife's mother tells him that she's been found and is alive. He comes back to her bedside and sits by it for the rest of the night, the entire town relieved and overjoyed that one of their own is not lost. The movie ends with the wife awakening, her long hair all the way down, bedecked in a white nightgown and white sheets, her roughly four-year-old son sleeping by her side, she awakens at the rising of the sun to her husband by her bedside, and they share a kiss that dissolves into rays of sunlight and the burst of the sun. Is it not the most beautiful image in all of cinema?</span><br /><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">18 hours after this husband almost became a wife-murderer and a few minutes after he almost becomes a mistress murderer, his wife awakens, and they live on, if not happily ever after, then redeemed with a second chance at life - the seemingly redeemed husband seemingly proven utterly deserving of happiness and forgiveness, never mind that had he remained a good husband, the life of his wife would never have been in danger, let alone twice, let alone that the first of the two times, he was the direct cause of the danger, never mind that he was almost became a murderer yet again just a moment before his reunion with his wife. </span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Sunrise is exactly as melodramatic a movie as it sounds like, with those utterly unbelievable silent movie gestures and a dramaturgy that wouldn't be believable in a Christmas pageant. And yet it should matter not a whit. Its melodrama is just a symptom of the metaphysical drama taking place onscreen. The metaphorical stakes are nothing less than a human soul, the husband's soul. What yetzer will the soul embrace? Will evil be rewarded and virtue punished? Is a redeemed soul that once strayed deserving of any reward? &nbsp;As melodramatic as Sunrise is, these are not questions easy to answer, and as any Hollywood movie must, Sunrise tries to answer them definitively, and yet it cannot. How many days before the husband erupts again in a violent rage? How many days before he tires of the farm and eye wanders again to another city girl who's probably named Rachel. </span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Sunrise speaks to us from another world where cynicism has yet to be invented. Men are men, strapping, quick to anger, quick to lust, quick to violence, yet able to be soothed by the purity of love, for which it is a woman's holy duty - a duty she can either assume, thereby becoming like an intercessing goddess, or reject, thereby becoming a whore. It is very easy to be cynical about such movies, and yet one's critical faculties feel an overwhelming urge to melt in the presence of such sincerity. Just as in the music of Bach or the painting of Rafael; Murnau arrived on world history at a very specific moment when his chosen artform was on an indivertible course to conquer the world with its power. 1927 was the final full year of film's Silent Era, and the very moment when visual storytelling blossomed in a manner never seen before and perhaps never since. In this final twilight of Silent Film, everything about the visual components of movies become as fluid and poetic as ballet - sets, lighting, costumes, exposures, even overacting: Sunrise, Metropolis, Faust, Flesh and the Devil, Mare Nostrum, The Son of the Sheik, Sparrows, The Temptress, What Price Glory?, The Winning of Barbara Worth, It, The Italian Straw Hat, London After Midnight, The General, Pandora's Box, The Crowd, The Wind, Underworld, The Unknown, Steamboat Bill Jr., An Andalusian Dog, Lonesome, The Passion of Joan of Arc, Queen Kelly, Sadie Thompson, Show People, Diary of a Lost Girl, The Lodger, Man With a Movie Camera, The Last Command, The Docks of New York, The Circus, 7th Heaven. Just as it was forty-five years later, there was something magic in the cellophane - but the magic dissipated far more quickly. The Golden Age our parents may currently reminisce upon took sixteen years between Bonnie and Clyde on one side and The Right Stuff on the other. The Golden Age which their grandparents remembered began around 1926 and was all over by 1929, but for those threeish years, all a director seemingly had to do was be competent at his job, and he'd create something eternal. </span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">There were flashier directors after Murnau who had much more trenchant insights into human nature</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">, but insight into humans would dilute everything which makes Murnau so special. Just as with Bach, I doubt there is a single artist in his medium who can make you believe again in everything about life about which you've abandoned all hope. If you're close to suicide, watch Sunrise. You may have thought yourself a cynic, but all bad feeling melts in the presence of its beauty - it is the beauty of dawn, of hope, of the idea that not a single person in the entire world is beyond redemption or undeserving of it. It tells the sinner within us all that no matter how badly we oppress others, we are not beyond mercy. It is the kind of hope that those of us privileged enough to feel will use as resolve to take our instinct toward sin and use it for virtue while having to question no longer what is virtuous: to move mountains, to overthrow governments, to build societies, to make a girl who was nearly a movie star into the love of your life.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And all this is precisely everything that Carmen least wanted to hear or see at this moment. Carmen was probably much too close to her agonies to experience anything like a trigger for reliving them, but the idea that a man who is so clearly evil can achieve redemption so quickly was everything that contradicted the last eighteen months of her life. When a man has murder in his heart, there is no redemption for him, and even if there is perhaps an infinitesimal possibility of redemption, it's certainly not something the man discovers over the course of a single fucking day. </span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Steve did not see her rolling her eyes and grinding her teeth and tensing up her hands in the darkness of his room. He often looked over at her to gauge her reaction, but never caught her at any particularly expressive moment. As we men do 95% of the time, he saw what we wished to see in this particular woman, and if men much more experienced and confident around women than young Steve have no idea what women are thinking, then how was Steve to know? And therefore it came as quite a shock to him when Carmen let out an enormous guffaw toward the end when this prodigally murderous husband kneels in a state of grace at the bedside of his utterly saintly, unblemishable, wife.</span></div><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The second after Carmen let out her roaring cackle, she apologized profusely, as anyone in a new relationship would after guffawing at a potential significant other's favorite movie. When Steve immediately turned the movie off and light on, she went somewhat limp, as though the dread coursing through her heart dissociating herself from the room before she had to experience the inevitable melodrama that would ensue. But, to her astonishment, Steve was extremely interested in knowing what she thought.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">But for one of the first times in her life, the inkwell of her verbal acuity had dried, and she was at a loss to explain precisely what she found so offensive about the movie.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Why did she weep when she saw his books? Because for the last few weeks, she'd found herself unable to recall what she'd read. Books were, to her, something to access with instant neurological availability. One glance at a piece of paper, and it was committed by heart for life. Whole tractates of the King James Bible, whole acts by Shakespeare, whole chapters of the Quixote and whole stories by Kafka she could recite in the original Castillian Spanish and Prague German with the exact pronunciation of its location and period, whole piano concertos by Mozart - both the solo piano part and the orchestral score, whole albums of Edith Piaf and whole operas by Verdi which she was able to sing and play on the piano as though it were second nature, not only able to sing any jazz standard or song by Dylan or The Beach Boys or trash song by Herman's Hermits or Tiny Tim, but able to improvise half-hour piano solos around them with countermelodies and modulations and thematic interpolations of a dozen other songs by the same artist and a dozen more by the artists they influenced and the artists who influenced them. Any one of which she could summon to mind and memory as though by animal instinct, as naturally as the rest of us take a breath or eat a meal after a day's fasting; any one of which were available to call to mind for an audition.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Her parents had no idea where she came from. They were rural immigrants like any rural immigrants, perhaps a bit better at what they did than most, and perhaps assimilated a bit more easily into American life than some did. Music was not something they made themselves, but at they were aware of music and loved it, and surely all four their own parents were musical - folk musicians to whom a career in music, or any career at all, was an utterly alien concept. When they weren't fishing or farming or selling their goods, they played the quena and the bandolina and banduryia and the bukhot; national instruments of the Philippines and Colombia, where their days were spent as farmers and fishermen, and nights around campfires and oil lamps with Tinkling and Muisca dancing - a life that could just as easily take place in either 1600 AD or BC as in 1940. You got up in the morning, you served your particular God, you did your best to avoid other spirits, and you went to sleep until one unsuspecting night when sleep claimed you. &nbsp;Legendary family stories developed around particular members of the family, but you didn't know if these family members died a few years before you were born, or a few hundred years; maybe even a few thousand. Perhaps variations on these particular stories were common to every family, every town, every region of the world, and perhaps all these folk tunes are just as similar from place to place. But because these stories and this music have no historical record, they seem infinitely more authentic - coming to us from that ether generated by the long darkness of pre-history, when the world was only explicable through magic. Life itself was magic, any day when a person was shielded from death was its own miracle that required a supernatural explanation. Every respite from death was a beautiful gift, every object of order that endowed life with ever so slightly more convenience was wrested from the chaos of nature, and therefore an object of indescribable beauty that could not be conceived had it not already existed. For a moment in these people's lives of whom we have no record, these artful objects did not imitate nature as so much humdrum art does, but rewrites nature's very laws, and therefore every folk tune was beautiful and perfect, every folk tale was beautiful and perfect, every pot and plate was beautiful and perfect, every meal was beautiful and perfect, all of them gifts handed down from above and below by forces well beyond their understanding, because they were all wrested from a nature that would never guarantee a life with the presence of any of them, and the presence of any of these gifts from the spiritual realm was a gift to be savored until the spiritual realm claimed them back. A pot, a plate, an instrument, could so easily break. A musician or a storyteller could die. The fish could disappear from the water, the crops not grow, the animals disappear from the forest. And where there was light, darkness would descend upon the face of the deep.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Miracles were not supposed to happen in America, and yet, here was the miracle that was Carmen Chavez - with all the advances in technique, here was a person who overcame technique and played with it as a baby does with a rattle. Perhaps she's a second Mozart, perhaps she's even a Shakespeare of performance - someone for whom a career as arm candy in a Burt Reynolds movie would be utterly wasted. She should be playing and singing Poulenc and Schubert at Carnegie Hall, she should be playing and singing Cleopatra and Sally Bowles on the West End.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Her parents, both of them, stopped going to church when they came to this country, but when Carmen sang lullabyes back to her mother when she was six months old, when she was speaking entire sentences at nine months in Spanish, English, and Tagalog, reading in all three languages by a little after her second birthday, and reading adult books by four years old. It was shortly after her fourth birthday that her parents had confirmation that something extraordinary was happening to their daughter - perhaps a literal confirmation. They flew back for a cousin's confirmation in Bagota when she was four, and during the celebration in the downstairs church rec room, somebody had broken into the organ loft and made the whole church resound with the note perfect melody of Alma Redemptoris Mater. After the melody was complete, it was played a second time with harmonies, and the harmonies were completely different than the usual organist, perhaps simpler but they worked just as well, perhaps better. But this was no teenage amateur breaking in - both the door and the organ were simply unlocked, and little Carmen, four years old but barely looking three, sitting down on a bench upon which her legs were barely long enough to reach the end of, let alone reach the pedals, and played on a keyboard all by herself. The organist was eating bandeja paisa and drinking aguardiente just as everybody else was, so he stormed up to the organ loft with his ever-ready switch, expecting to find some teenager with a year of piano lessons who broke in and possibly damaged the door. But the moment he saw this girl barely larger than an infant play Alma Redemptoris Mater, he dared not make his presence known until she was done. When she was, he picked her up, he kissed her on the forehead and told her she was a miracle from Heaven. He carried her downstairs to tell her parents, they wept as they knelt down in front of a statue of the Virgin. It was a miracle such as those of which their own parents always spoke. For twenty years, they never missed a Sunday, and every spare dollar not devoted to good works was devoted to music lessons for an extraordinary child who came from nowhere. </span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The only way she could have known about these keys was on those few times her father took her to see Uncle Ray (who couldn't see her of course), and Uncle Ray would play some songs on the piano for her while Carmen's father fixed some wiring in the lights (why Ray Charles needed lights nobody knew...) and Carmen watched the keys which Uncle Ray could not see as he played. As Carmen progressed, Uncle Ray was all too happy to give an occasional lesson in jazz whenever he was in town, and after the lesson was over, Carmen would be sent to play with a friend down the street with a couple dollars for candy while Uncle Ray gave Carmen's mother a lesson too. </span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">When Carmen's Ina told Uncle Ray heard about what happened, he sat her at the piano, and instead of playing Alma Redemptoris Mater, she harmonized a note perfect and slightly out of tempo What Would I Do Without You and sang the whole song, a few words were mispronounced as a four-year-old would without thinking of what she can't understand: "I get all closer to me," instead of "Aw, get all closer to me." Even a brilliant four-year-old plays like a brilliant four-year-old, but a four year old like this could astonish the world.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This narrator has little to no interest in the details of how she appeared on Ed Sullivan and Dick Clark's American Bandstand when she was seven. He has only a little interest in the details of the private piano teacher from Hungary, Mr. Nordau (Doctor Nordau), contracted directly from Universal Studios by Uncle Ray, who paid every cent of those lessons for twelve years, the methods and personal manner of Dr. Nordau turned her into an obedient girl savant until her fingertips bled. He would balance a coin upon her hands to teach her finger positioning, and when the coin fell off he would strike the hand with a ruler. By nine she'd already graduated from Beethoven Sonatas to Liszt Transcendental Etudes, so the red letter day was not when she mastered a new piece, it was when she graduated from a dime on her hand to a penny, from a penny to a nickel, from a nickel to a quarter. He also has little to no interest in the details of in the details of the other upper-middle-class immigrant teachers from Germany and Austria and Poland and Romania and Czechoslovakia and Italy and the Ukraine who taught her in the high school for science she insisted upon going to rather than a school for the performing arts, or who coached her in the various extracurriculars for which her abilities and work ethic could only be described, once again, as prodigious: drawing, dancing, German, French, Italian, English, creative writing, calculus, chemistry, biology, physics, philosophy, theology, history, current events... Still greater than her ability to assimilate information was how each teacher took it upon themselves, as though they were the only one to do so, to try to mentor Carmen and steer her in the direction of their field, as though netting such a prize achiever into their field would be the achievement that justified decades of surrendering some prestigious post-Hochshule career to put up with every worthless and verzogenes Gor und wildes Tier in the security of Southern California.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">How did she imbibe so much information so quickly? Well, if one can reduce such ability to a practical application rather than divinely-mandated ability, her technique was to simply sing her facts. From the moment at five years old that she realized "Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally" could be sung to the famous tune from Eine Kleine Nachtmusik if you put an extra 'please' on that ending D, she realized that she could find the right piece of music to assimilate any degree of information she wished. But as I'm sure you've guessed by now, what unfortunately matters in Carmen's story is not the ascent, but the descent.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So you'll unfortunately have to permit me to fast forward to five years later, sometime around 1984, when it came time to name their first daughter. Steve and Carmen already had two 'failed' pregnancies to their confution before Cleo came into the world, miscarried because of what the doctor so tactfully referred to as an 'incompetent uterus.' Due to a division in the uterine septum, the children could not derive nourishment from their mother. They therefore passed all too quickly into lavatorial oblivion. I don't remember whether it was the second or the third time that Carmen sprained her pelvis during which Steve asked an OBGYN to take a look and see if the uterine canal could be repaired during the same time that the orthopedist tried to mend the pelvic damage.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Surely enough, six months after the surgery, Carmen had a green light to get pregnant again, and nine months later, they commemorated that joyous day by naming their first daughter Clarissa, in part after Virginia Woolf's most famous creation, but in part to commemorate the day when they first got together and Steve helped Carmen to understand what became their favorite book: Mrs. Dalloway, but mostly because Steve's mother insisted that the daughter be named after her own recently departed mother, Clara, who came to Los Angeles from Berlin in 1936 with a four-year-old daughter hidden in a large suitcase with some holes punched out for air while a husband and two pubescent boys were stranded in Germany.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It was all pretty hard until 1992. Carmen's capacity as a pianist became more and more reduced. By 1987, she could not play for more than an hour at a time without straining a muscle in her hand. By 1992, the strain became a sprain. By 1998, it was a half-hour before she'd break a finger. By 2001, it was the length of a Chopin Waltz played at pianissimo, and then she had to close the piano for the rest of the day. By 2004, she'd forgotten that she couldn't play; she would sight read whatever music was on the piano stand, and would negotiate around the two or three digits she'd already broken in the days and weeks preceding with a howling scream cutting off whatever once beloved Schumann character piece or Schubert Impromptu or Debussy Prelude caught her attention from the piano stand (their younger daughter made sure to put different music on the piano every day so there wouldn't be the same piece resounding around the house forever).</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Through it all, Carmen still had her gorgeous voice, which thirty-five years of cigarettes could not wreck, even if it moved her voice down a half-dozen fachs. Unfortunately, she realized that any kind of performance, any at all, might put her straight into the public's black eye because of her time with The Producer. Who knows to what she could yet again subject herself, or to what she could subject her family? To remind people that another paramour of this producer still stalked the streets of LA like a ghost could reopen all manner of old trauma, put the life of everyone she cared about at risk from people The Producer might pay to silence her before she talks, and might make a scandal of her life and her childrens' to the press. She and Steve both agreed that she had to stay away from the stage until The Producer was dead, not even so much as a dinner theater. The Producer was still around Hollywood, one of the many ghosts of Hollywood infamy, a low-level, stipended producer allowed to walk around the studio lots, absorbing the sun like a vegetable as he 'supervised' B-movie releases, which the New New Hollywood let him refer to as his 'comeback.' The comeback necessitated many tabloid magazine and TV stories which would plaster his many sins and conquests and legends ten years after his trivial comeback seemed like any comeback at all. Once every two months there was another scoop chasing journalist calling Carmen, not talk about her story, but about the story of the woman Carmen was left for - Tamera Wittenberg. No comment of course.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Nobody could figure out of Tamera Wittenberg was European Royalty or white trash from Kansas, but she was tall, twig-like, leggy and blond in precisely that way which the charitable call statuesque and the uncharitable call a bimbo, but the 80's called perfect beauty. It's true, she didn't seem like a great brain, but she was as quiet as a mouse and submissive as a dog with its belly up. She was never anything but polite to Carmen.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Carmen however, had nowhere else to go, and was, in fact, living in a room down the hall from the Producer for the first five months that Tammy and The Producer were involved. Carmen had no job, and even after The Producer took up with Tammy, she was understandably worried that The Producer would go ballistic if she showed any initiative outside his house, so for five months, she simply stayed in the house, she read, she went to school, she went back to her room, where the maid would leave a meal for her at her doorstep.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This continued for five months, she would speak to The Producer when spoken to, and occasionally he would visit with her in her room - where discourse was at least a bit more civil than it used to be, and congress a bit more gentle. But one day, Carmen heard the same shouts and shattering of glass and turning over furniture and whimpering tears that she knew so well from time past emanating from the bedroom that once was hers. It was eight-thirty in the morning; she immediately walked out the room without a single possession. She walked from The Producer's Beverly Hills house to which she belonged for eighteen months to the USC campus to meet with Steve three hours later, and life resumed as well as it could.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Carmen wanted to teach voice, but unfortunately, there is never enough market for a voice teacher and far too much market for piano teachers. One would think that parents would go mad with the desire to teach their children most basic musical skill in the world, but singing is so basic that there is no mark of respectability to it. The piano, rather, is the ultimate mark of respectability. If one can carry a tune, one can sing. But to play a piano well is no less an achievement than building your own house or creating beautiful woodwork and clay pots. In Europe, America, or Asia, child who plays piano well is the ultimate mark of a family that wrested order from the existential chaos of living in a lower social class.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Back in the 80's, there was a full roster of piano students whom she taught while Steve watched the kids, but Carmen knew that there were many better piano teachers in the area, so she kept her prices much lower and hoped that volume would cover the expenses which her billing would certainly not. As so many music teachers are, she was in no way cut for a job of managing children; managing their anxious mothers who want to believe their child another Horowitz, managing their bored fathers - more interested in picking her up than his children. Even among her few intermediate-level students, she knew she could never impart any valuable musical ideas to indifferent children whose parents assured them that they would understand why they needed to play piano when they were older. She was becoming like so many of her teachers who wanted better for her, and she did not understand why this new generation of students were so much less obedient than she once was. Her frustration with her charges was continually palpable to them, and most of the kids who'd been with her longest would dread their lessons in a way that ensured any inclination toward practicing killed in its inception. A few times a year, another student would break down in tears mid-lesson, and a call would follow a few days later from the mother: "Jessica has too much on her plate."</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">All through this life-era, Steve lost as much money as he made. Even with health insurance, the surgeries Carmen needed ever more direly were a fortune each to each - and the more surgeries she needed, the higher her premiums went, until she was just plain uninsurable and their family policy was cancelled. Steve and the children had to each get an individual plan, but Carmen was on her own, corrective surgery after orthopedic surgery after cardiothoracic surgery, and eventually even neurological surgery.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Furthermore, matter how long since she left The Producer for him, Steve feared that Carmen was accustomed to a luxury he couldn't possibly provide, and couldn't possibly admit he couldn't provide. If she hadn't bought a new dress or jewel in a month, Steve would buy her one (to the very end, Carmen was immaculately dressed). But not even Carmen's needs and wants, or the thought of a baby Steve thought Carmen couldn't possibly carry to term, were enough to keep Steve an accountant. When Steve told his mother he was about to go into business with a friend to operate a video store, her screams woke baby Clarissa up.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Steve's father was more supportive and said to give it, and their son, a chance to do what he wants, but his mother was right. Even in 1980's Los Angeles, there wasn't enough demand for a local independent to carve out a share of the market from Blockbuster Video. Had they closed in 1986, Steve would still have possession over the money from his accounting days to pay off their loan. But Steve and his friend kept borrowing to keep it going until early '88, by which time the bank came to repo everything in his house while his four year old daughter absorbed her first vivid memories and his wife tried to calm their screaming six-month-old second daughter: Elizabeth. The furniture, the silverware, the fridge, the beds, the piano, the violin, the books - all 900 of them, the 3700 VHS tapes, even the film cannisters and the projector equipment from college. We were lucky they didn't take the house. For the next five years, Carmen had to teach piano from a four-and-a-half octave Yamaha keyboard which her stepfather bought for her.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Steve did the only thing a real man can do in that situation, he went to his parents for a loan. His mother gave him a big hug, and of course she told him that of course they would, but he knew the condition.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So Steve went back to managing managing books and accounts at the very same bank that repossessed everything he owned. At least they knew him... But when he applied for a job interview, the very last place where thought he'd get an interview, the place he applied to as a private joke, was the first to call him back. Nobody seemed to remember that they took his entire life away from him just a month ago. Perhaps they did, but they were too polite to mention it, or perhaps they were trying to make it up to him; or perhaps he was too generic to remember, or perhaps he was just another anonymously bad investment vehicle among thousands. Nobody checks your credit score when you're applying to be the man who checks the credit score. All they knew was that he had shining recommendations from the last bank at which he worked, high academic honors from the Marshall School of Business, and a mother who threatened to take her account elsewhere.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Steve stuck with his mother's agreement in good faith for three years. Again and again, he offered to repay the loan, but his parents wouldn't hear of it. Every day was miserable, this was the price he paid for doing nothing but watch movies and change diapers for three years, but Steve had a life again. He was making $35,000 a year, but after taxes it was all pocketable money thanks to his parents (his mother's) loan and their agreement to pay for any further surgeries Carmen needs. His beautiful wife learned to spend on a budget surprisingly well, his daughters were brilliant and the older one already showed some flashes of her mother's former brilliance.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In 1991, Steve returned to his mother with a check for the entirety of the loan. He didn't pay for the surgeries &nbsp;"I'm going into business again and I've quit my job."</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">"Please tell me..."</span></div><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">"No it's not in video."</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It wasn't even movie related. Of course his mother refused to accept the check, and she was actually slightly enthused when she heard his plan, though not as enthused as she might have been. It's LA, people need protection from crime, and he was going to become his friend's junior partner and manage the distribution of car alarms.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It wasn't a bad idea. His parents had been burgled twice in the last five years. Sure, Fairfax was not the neighborhood it once was, but you never used to expect anything like that kind of crime can happen to you. Why can't Steve go into home alarm?</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The date Steve stood up to his mother was March 2nd, 1991. The next day, Rodney King would get the pulp beaten from him at the corner of Foothill Boulevard and Osborne Street. Business was slow for fourteen months thereafter. Steve was drawing a salary, but while home alarm was something every white person thought he needed, too few people seemed to think they need a car alarm.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">But on April 29th, 1992, Reginald Denny and Fidel Lopez were pulled from their cars and beaten on camera as a racial maelstrom deluged its way through the City of Angels, and car alarms become something everyone thought they needed, not because their cars might be stolen, but because a car alarm can surely be what saves you when a pack of marauders attack you while still in a car you can lock, and all you have to defend yourself is a vehicle made of steel that can go up to 200 miles-per-hour.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">By June, Steve, who'd never made a salary higher than $40,000, was pulling in $50,000 a month, and would continue to do so for the duration of the 90's - roughly $90,000 a month in the currency of a quarter-century later.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It was also in 1992 that Steve's father passed away quite suddenly; an apparent heart attack while behind the wheel of his SUV, but Steve's mother didn't want an autopsy to confirm it. No sooner than her husband passed did Steve's mother want to be all the more in the lives of her only child and granddaughters. But no longer had Steve to rely on his mother for loans, no longer had Steve to rely on his mother for advice, no longer had Steve to rely on his mother for support. In the 80's, when Steve and Carmen went out on the weekends, they would drop the kids off with Steve's parents, and his mother would keep a close eye on the kids, but in the 90's, they could hire a stunningly cheap Spanish-speaking nanny. In the 80's, when Carmen needed surgery and neither Steve nor either of her parents or step-parents could pay for it, Steve's mother would sign checks with no questions, except for many private words with her son about how disappointed she was that he married such a high-maintenance woman. But in the 90's, Steve made more money in a year than his parents made in ten. In the 80s, Steve's mother would call four days a week, full of advice and opinions, and her son would listen to them all patiently and with seeming cheer. In the 90's, Steve was sometimes too busy to even take his Mom's call once a week.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Steve's mother - whom we'll call Denarius, not because that was her name but because that was the only thing anybody ever called her which she liked - didn't exactly hold her tongue about her opinions of her son's ingratitude, but she at least held it by her own standards. Even if she complained constantly to relatives whom she knew Steve never had any time for, she never complained about Steve's newfound independence to Steve himself. Perhaps Steve was right to be uninterested in his extended family, they never really forgave Denarius for marrying outside the faith, but her relatives all lived in San Francisco and Los Angeles, but how many semites were there in Pismo Beach?</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Steve's grandmother Clara, his Oma, wanted a future for a daughter with no father, no brothers, no money, no English. These supercilious ersatz Yekke relatives were born in Frankfurt and came to America as children more than fifty years ago. They made millions in schmatteh factories in which worked lots of Jews who had the bad foresight to came over only later when there were more of us, when business was already tougher, and when Jewish immigrants didn't have much money to bring with them.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Aside from the suits and dresses they wore on all occasions, no matter how warm the weather, these relatives might as well have been from another planet - Russia even... Jewel-encrusted rings on half their fingers, necklaces for every day of the week, cars for both the husband and the wife which chauffeurs usually drove, a dinner fit for Shabbos every night. And yet, it was the Great Depression, so apparently they had very little money they could lend a supposedly cherished relative with a kleines Madchen. Sympathy, sympathy, sympathie for their plight, a job in the factory, but not even enough additional money to pay the rent, and not a cent offered to her try to bribe Clara's family out of Berlin.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Los Angeles was a big city, but Clara knew she wasn't wanted there. If her only remaining relatives wanted to keep her side of the family as small as possible, then she knew she had to go elsewhere to give her daughter a new family.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">She meant to go up to San Francisco, but as so often happens in these immigrant stories, the only Auto she could afford to buy broke down in a smaller city, Pismo Beach. Rather than get a new car, she renovated a derelict motel and turned it into a nice bed and breakfast with a restaurant on the downstairs floor. Pismo Beach is the Clam Capital of the World, or so they say, so Clara's signature dishes were clams fried in schmaltz and clams stewed in the Yemenite Zhug which Clara's aunt taught her to make. There was kugel and matzoh ball soup on the menu, a brisket sandwich, potato pancakes, a beef stew on Saturdays, home-cured pastrami, and corned beef around September, homebaked babka, chopped liver, blintzes around June, stuffed cabbage, beef sausages, a potato and spinach pastry which the migrant workers thought were empanadas, chocolate chip biscotti, honey cake in the fall, pickled herring, home fried doughnuts in the winter, a carrot yam stew with raisins and apricots around Thanksgiving. The Matzoh Ball soup was so popular that a number of people suggested that Clara should put some shellfish in it and turn it into a Boulliabaise, but Clara's personality was so forbidding that nobody would dare make the suggestion. Nevertheless, "Clara's" was a hit, and if it had nothing to do with the winningness of Clara's personality, it certainly had something to do with her daughter's.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Clara never married again, and her daughter never saw so much as a man in her mother's life. But Denarius was the petite and exotic and funny waitress who served with a smile after school and before homework, who always took the orders right and remembered the name of every second-time customer. She was not beautiful in the way all the other swell girls in Pismo Beach were; she was a half-foot shorter, she had skin with a perpetual tan and a bumpy nose, she wouldn't wait for the fella to pull out the chair or hold the door, and never waited for the guy to tell her what she thought before telling him first. But the swell fellas in Pismo were crazy for her. Every one of them was a faithful customer after school, and every one of them probably asked her on a date multiple times, but she'd never say yes to any of them, and because she never said yes to any of them, they'd come back to Clara's twice as often to try to change her mind.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">One guy never asked her out, so he, of course, became the one Denarius asked out. In 1955, he became Clara's son-in-law. Frederick Johansen, six-foot-four, All-American football lineman, decorated Korean War veteran, electrical engineer, man of five-hundred words a day, and former Lutheran acolyte. Certainly not good enough for her daughter, but good enough for America.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Los Angeles relations refused to come to the wedding, refused to send a gift, and refused to speak to Clara for more than fifteen years. Until '55, Clara would come down every year to Los Angeles for the High Holidays and the Seders; she went to every Bar Mitzvah, every wedding, every bris. Occasionally Denarius would accompany her, but usually not. Denarius barely had half a dozen conversations with any of them as a child. Who the hell knows if these relatives ever went to shul if there wasn't a high holiday or a simcha involved? But even if they didn't, to marry a shegetz among cultural Jews is tantamount to declaring allegiance to Hitler; it is and will always be an excomunnicable offense that breaks families apart forever because it's the argument leads down the rabbit hole of theology's most important and unresolvable question: Is faith motivated by love, or is love motivated by faith?</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In our modern era when tolerance has finally won a few battles over faith, the question of intermarriage becomes still more vital. When the world shows signs of growing more tolerant, what need is there to uphold the groups and struggles of old? Every intermarriage, be it Jew to Gentile, Black to White, Liberal to Conservative, Lamb to Lion, is a rejection of old polarities - a declaration that all the great struggles which your ancestors underwent were absolutely unnecessary, irrelevant to the present, and deserve to be sucked into a black hole of forgetfulness. Memory can be as much a curse as a blessing, and surely many memories deserve to be forgotten. But in the modern era, when we so often seem on the precipice of a finer new world in which differences can finally be reconciled, perhaps all that stops us from realizing a world that's at least closer to this finer new world is the fearful memory of the world as it once was and threatens to be again. However, because we cannot erase these memories, perhaps these memories are precisely what dooms us to never achieve a world of greater tolerance.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It was within a month of the wedding that Clara unexpectedly took up Fred's parents invitation to visit their church. In her nearly twenty years in Pismo Beach, the local legend Claradonna Zweig was never seen to socialize with anyone, and Fred's parents only invited her out of politeness. Yet by the end of 1955, she was a regular attendee to St. John’s Lutheran Church in Pismo Beach who insisted upon catering the Sunday lunches free of charge. On Good Friday 1956, she took baptism and never missed a Sunday thereafter for her remaining twenty-eight years.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Clara’s was closed every Sunday thereafter, and after Church, Claradonna Helena Zweig would return home with a friend from her congregation, Sieglinde Schafer, a widow from Breslau whose husband, a promising Captain in Germany’s Eighth Army, was felled by a hail of bullets but two months after they were married in June 1914. Hauptmann Schulz was one of the 12,000 fallen Germans at the Battle of Tannenberg, whose legendary acts of bravery enabled the slaughter of 170,000 Russians. Sieglinde was roughly ten years older than Clara. She’d found her way to Pismo Beach with her father in roughly 1920, after the German riots against the Polish, who would eventually transform Breslau into Wroclaw, burned down her extremely German father’s medical offices. Who knows how they ended up in Pismo Beach, but Dr. Schafer died in his sleep in 1938, an eloquent and celebrated member of the Central Californian Bund whose funeral at St. John’s Lutheran was attended by hundreds of German-Americans and Klansmen alike. He was eminent throughout the state, perhaps even the Western United States, for his many kind words and trenchant insights about the great strength of new German regime. Every Bund organization from Montana to New Mexico would engage him to speak as an expert on German politics. &nbsp;&nbsp;</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And so every Sunday in the nineteen-sixties and seventies, Clara and Sieglinde would go after church to Clara’s modest apartment over the restaurant. They’d sing all the songs of gymnasium days, they’d play four-hand duets on Clara’s out of tune upright, they’d recite all the Goethe and Heine forced upon their memories by rote, they’d talk disapprovingly of the other church members, and they’d recall friends and husbands long dead. </span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Clara’s daughter found Sieglinde Schafer a bit icky, and was certain Ms. Schafer was antisemite, but she was happy that her mother finally made a friend when all she’d ever seen from her mother was work and sacrifice and testiness. She had an older friend of her own not unlike Sieglinde, who could remind her of whom she truly was. </span><br /><br /><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Clara’s daughter, whom I suppose fancied herself all American, found Sieglinde Schafer rather icky, and was certain Ms. Schafer was antisemite like her father, but she was happy that her mother finally made a friend when all she’d ever seen from her mother was work and sacrifice and testiness. Even so, her mother's turn toward a new religion proved too much for her. </span><br /><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">St. John's installed a new Pastor right before Christmas 1965. A smiling blond from Montana who sported a flattop haircut and bolo ties every Sunday. On Good Friday '66, the tenth anniversary of Clara's baptism, he shocked the congregation by mounting the pulpit with a guitar in his hand. Younger members were overjoyed, they stood up and clapped excitedly while putting their arms in the air as though second nature. Clara and Sieglinde, on the other hand, were incensed and immediately petitioned the board for his firing. But no one on the board objected, they loved Pastor Lehmann, so that was the last which either Clara or Sieglinde made about the issue. For the next twenty years, they simply sat in the back pew and scowled. </span><br /><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Much less objectionable to Steve's grandmother was Pastor Lehmann's fundraisers for Reagan and Nixon, his preemptive encouragement of student deacons to volunteer for the Vietnam War, his public shaming of a lax daughter who asked a question about the War's justice. Clara had never been a political sort, instructing her daughter from the earliest age that political questions are what tear people apart from each other and can only interfere with people trying to go about their lives. But Clara's daughter began to notice the inveighs that Clara now seemed to be parroting from her Church about ungrateful students who protested against this great country of ours, and the ungrateful negroes who dare compare the way good Christians in the South treat their black people to the way godless Communists treat their billions of unfree citizens. The day that Fred offhandedly compared the segregationists to Nazis was the day he ended up with a bowl of Matzoh Ball soup dumped on his head. </span><br /><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">That last point about the ungratefulness of negroes was the one that Clara's daughter found truly inconceivable. How could Clara call negroes ungrateful when she owed so much her triumph in America to a negro woman? Neither Clara nor her daughter were the sole progenitors of 'Clara's success. The third, and perhaps most consequential, in their trinity of unexpected prosperity was Mrs. Washington, the kindly lady from Clayton County in Georgia whose husband drove her to work every day from Grover Beach </span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">at four in the morning in their beat up Plymouth Valiant before he went back home to get their four children ready for school and then drive fifty miles east to his job as a farmhand and then return at ten to pick Mrs. Washington up. The kindly lady who </span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">went every Sunday to sing in the church choir at Bethel Baptist, and catered their after-service lunches every week with 'Clara's leftover provisions from the week's food supply. When Clara herself became a Christian, she immediately informed Mrs. Washington that she no longer had access to the leftovers to cater her church because Clara would now use them to cater lunches at her own church. </span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Mrs. Washington was the kind of woman who would always sneak Clara's daughter a cookie, sometimes two or three, whenever Clara was too busy manning the stove or the cash register to look up. Running a business takes all kinds of people, and you need a boss who can kill with kindness as much as you need a boss who delights in killing. </span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Mrs. Washington was, begrudgingly, one of Clara's first hires. Clara thought that colored help, even if they worked in the kitchen, would drive customers away, but she needed the help immediately. Nobody knew who Clara was, and Clara had no idea how to get more applicants attention. The men were in the theaters of war, and their wives were almost fully employed in the factories. If Clara's was going to be a success, they needed all the help they could get. But Mrs. Washington had been waiting tables since she was an eight-year-old kid in Georgia. Clara had no idea how to take inventory, how to fill staffing needs, how to </span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">quickly </span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">update menus, and how to advertise. It was certainly not Clara who came up with the phone book advertisement in 1945: "Clara's: Home Cooking from the Jewish Mom You Never Knew You Needed," Every time a waitress broke down in tears from the stress of dealing with a customer, or from dealing with Clara, Mrs. Washington was always there with a hug and tissue. Every time a health department inspector or a supplier needed to be supplicated, it was Mrs. Washington, not Clara, who'd handle the negotiation. Every time a customer was in the hospital, Mrs. Washington would visit with a dinner tray taken without Clara's knowledge and some good cheer. Clara was an institution in Pismo Beach, but Mrs. Washington was the reason every customer over the age of 30 came back. </span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">And yet for almost twenty-five years, she never took her meal anywhere but in the kitchen. </span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">In 1966, an increasingly infirm Clara accidentally spilled a </span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">boiling</span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"> pot of Matzoh Ball soup on Mrs. Washington while she was mopping the kitchen floor. The skin on Mrs. Washington's limbs was forever disfigured thereafter, and she never properly walked again. Clara claimed to her daughter that it was the wet floor from the mop that made her slip, but her daughter always suspected that Clara, in her sixties and showing every year of it on her once waif-like and now witch-like frame, was already nowhere near as strong or coordinated as she once was.</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Perhaps Clara used the accident to explain an infirmity caused by the simple accumulation of years and cares. Clara was untouched by the scald of the soup, but she claimed that her arms and knees were bruised from the fall and was never the same thereafter. She also claimed to have a nagging pain in her right shoulder where the pot fell on her. She claimed that she sympathized with Mrs. Washington for how badly she was hurt by the fall, but perhaps she used her own pain to absolve herself of guilt.</span><br /><br /><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Clara told Mr. Washington that his wife deserved whatever Clara could possibly give her, but that Clara couldn't give her much. Secretly, Clara always thought she'd paid Mrs. Washington far too much, and occasionally suspected Mrs. Washington of occasionally skimming from the cash register. She carefully explained to Mr. Washington that she couldn't possibly pay them anything more than something minimal when Mrs. Washington could no longer work? The hale and healthy Mr. Washington, perfectly slender, grey at the temples and the mustache, with eyes that bore into interlocutors with all too much understanding, nodded </span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">silently and sagely as he stood in front of Clara's paltry explanation; not so much as a word in response after the hello,</span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"> and when she was finished, he walked out of the restaurant without saying so much as a goodbye. Clara promised the Washingtons a dollar twenty five a week for the rest of Mrs. Washington's life - a minimum wage for an employee who maximized Clara's life. She sent it in the mail every week until she died, but never got any confirmation that the Washingtons received it. </span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Denarius Zweig had never ridden a horse before meeting Annie-Jane Ivers, she’d never shot a gun, never played a hand of poker, never lit a fire, never slept under the open sky, never smoked a cigar or a joint, never skinned a deer. The boys all wondered where Clara’s daughter went when she wasn’t waiting tables, the answer was to let Annie-Jane Ivers show her the dank and steam and slit of the natural world. </span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Annie-Jane Ivers ran away from her father’s house in 1919, when she was only eleven - her mother perpetually bruised, her independence perpetually violated, her sister perpetually defeated. One month later, she became a permanent worker at Monsieur Marchand’s French Boarding House named Coquette. By fifteen, "Coquette" was the Madame. By seventeen, she was turned into to the street for asking that her older peers get better pay and treatment. Mr. Marchand explained that it was not because she asked once, but that she heard his explanation, yet insisted upon asking twice. </span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Over the next twenty years, Annie-Jane worked as a bandit, a banker, a blacksmith, a butcher, a bounty hunter, a cardshark, a cowherd, a deputy, a gold miner, a gunslinger, a homesteader, a marshal, a medicine showman, a missionary, a preacher, a railroad laborer, a rancher, a rustler, a schoolmarm, a shopkeeper, a snake oil salesman. No coquette she. You work overtime to survive, or survival works you over. </span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">1948, forty years old, five-feet ten, her hair a bluish silver, her shoulders broad and hands as calloused as any laborer in America, her face wizened by crow’s feet and laugh lines and four packs a day, her skin prunishly bronzed like a person who hadn’t been indoors in a quarter of a century, her eyes with the mischievously rapid movements of a woman hard to impress and easy to amuse, she walks into Clara’s and after ten minutes, Denarius gets her to order the cheese blintzes. Annie-Jane likes them so much that she comes back for the cheese blintzes eight nights in a row. Denarius tries to get her to order something else: the babka, the bialy, the borscht, the brisket, the bulbitchki, but no, she wants more cheese blintzes. </span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">With Annie-Jane’s barmaid humor and her scullery maid’s crudity, Clara’s daughter had never known it was possible to laugh like that. Clara did not approve of Annie-Jane’s loud ostentation, and warned her daughter not to get too friendly with this woman, but she couldn’t exactly tell a customer not to come who stayed for five hours at a time and ordered fifty dollars worth of blintzes every day. </span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In 1949, Annie-Jane acquires a hundred acre horsefarm. She invites both of the Zweigs to come out and see it. Clara, of course, says no for both her and her daughter. Her daughter, of course, calls Annie-Jane up and says that she’s going to come out there without her mother’s knowledge. The next day, she asks Fred Johansen out on a date next Saturday, on Sunday, she tells Clara that the date went so well that they’re going to have a second date that day. Clara doesn’t approve of her daughter moving so fast, but better to be with Fred Johansen than with that freienfrau. </span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The next day, Clara’s daughter rides a horse, shoots a deer, smokes a cigar, plays poker. Fred Johansen pecked her on the cheek yesterday, but when it’s time to say goodbye until the plans they made next week, Annie-Jane Ivers bends her backwards over her knee and gives Clara’s daughter a realization she can never unrealize. </span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Saturdays with Fred and Steve, Sundays with Annie-Jane. That’s how it was most weekends for eighteen years. When Denarius needed an excuse to start spending nights under the stars of Ivers Farms, she tells Fred they’re getting married. Seven weeks later, they declare their love before God under His watchful nave at St. John’s Lutheran. Within five years, the&nbsp;Saturday mornings and afternoons are entirely Steve’s, the Saturday nights and Sundays are entirely Annie Jane’s. Fred simply goes into the garage with his short-wave radio and tunes up his Chevy. </span><br /><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The farmhands give enormous respect to Denarius, never making so much as a pass or flirt, and give her the nickname 'Denarius' because she always rode a black horse. She didn't understand the nickname, but she loved it all the same. Nearly two decades of blissful Sundays, sleeping next to Annie-Jane in fields of open California pampus, awoken by American goldfinches and Savannah sparrows, vigilantly ready for the dawn to welcome another Sunday of riding and hunting with a sunstroked and windswept face which, for eighteen years, Fred never asked once how she acquired. </span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Sometime around Memorial Day 1967, Denarius returns to Clara's for work on Monday, not windswept but ashen. The only person with little enough tact to ask her what's wrong is Steve, who gets the first of many an earful from his mother. </span></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Steve never got the full story of what happened to Auntie-Jane except what he read thirty years later on microfilm - which was that the legendary Annie-Jane Ivers was found on a small minority of Pine Flat Lake's shoreline that wasn't on her property. Her wrists had been bruised from shackles and her legs chained to a weight that the coroner said had clearly fallen off. He also indicated the presence of multiple barbituates in her system that he speculated were ingested by dissolving in strong alcohol. </span></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">One find and simple day in the early summer when he was eating some Matzoh Ball soup, a drunken hand from the horse farm showed up and started screaming some variation that only imprinted itself within his seven-year-old brain as 'YOU DID IT! IT WAS YOU!' while waving a gun at screaming customers while Clara sobbed unreservedly. Denarius emerges thirty seconds later from the back with a rifle, loaded and cocked, and tells the farmhand they'll talk outside. The conversation from the window was animated, but the guy never showed his face around Steve's Mom again. </span></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">What happened was probably as simple as Annie-Jane growing sick after twenty years of Denarius living her weekday life as a devoted daughter to a repressed Jesus freak and devoted wife to a beach bum drip, and who knows what a person as hard-scrabble as Annie-Jane Ivers would have done to complete an objective denied for twenty years? As Steve read the microfilm, he began to remember Auntie Jane showing up at inopportune moments like when the family was at a Howard Johnson's, which would prompt an animated discussion twenty feet from the table, or showing up unannounced at their Pismo house, sometimes appearing from some distance in the window. Steve remembered thinking it was very strange when her mother ordered Auntie Jane out of the diner, "I just want to eat here. Remember when that was normal?" she'd say. Until then, Steve had never seen Auntie-Jane in the diner himself, but he thought it as odd as Auntie Jane that she was being ordered out. </span></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">It was at a fourth of July party with the Johanssen clan that Clara’s daughter decided to do something which surprised the hell out of everybody, particularly Fred. Steve was seven years old, and she decided he needed to go to Hebrew school. “But why?” Fred asked, not in frustration but in bewilderment. “Why does anybody need a Hebrew education in Pismo Beach?”</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“That’s the problem. We have to leave Pismo.” </span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And just like that, they moved. Fred Johansen was the type that always got along. His entire family was in Pismo more than a hundred years earlier. Dozens of births and deaths and baptisms and confirmations, decades of toil and sacrifice and simmering family resentments that were worked through by the thousands upon thousands of little bonds of love that keep a family together through their worst periods to the moments that all families cherish - the holiday dinners, the birthday parties, the lazy afternoons on the beach, the relaxed Sunday barbecues, the drunken nights out that occasionally ended in throwing a punch or two, but always made up for the next day, the grass they smoked in the back yard. Yet it never occurred to Fred, or to any other Johansen, that such bonds had to work to be maintained, or could strain under the pressure of longer distance. </span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Whether or not those bonds strained, Fred kept his feelings to himself as he always did, and but for perhaps an extra whiskey before bed or a doobie after everybody was asleep, he was the same quiet picture of smiling amiability in middle age that he was when his wife forcefed him matzoh ball soup for the first time. If he disliked it, he kept it to himself, and sipped on matzoh ball soup at least once a week for the rest of his life. </span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So in 1967, Steve found a new job as an electrical engineer in LA, and the Johansens moved to the big city. Steve went to public school in Fairfax, and his mother, in truly theatrical Hollywood fashion, got a Bas Mitzvah at the closest Reform Temple, Beth Hoveh, and while she only knew a couple college acquaintances in LA, she made sure to turn the Bas Mitzvah into an event. She sent laminated invitations to every member of the Beth Hoveh and to all her estranged relatives. Worried that these relatives might disapprove of a woman being called to the Torah, she kept calling their houses, talking their ears off for forty-five minutes at a time with whatever subject she could think up, and boaring her way into renewed ties and friendship with them until she was sure they’d relent and RSVP ‘Yes.’ The reception was not held at the synagogue, but at Nate n’Al’s Deli in Beverly Hills, near where her relatives lived. </span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Fred wasn’t the type who thought much about money. He didn’t spend much, and there wasn’t much he wanted to spend. As far as luxuries went, he had a small boat he built himself, a couple rifles for hunting and a fishing pole, a wet bar in his basement, the 1952 Chevy 3100 pickup that he drove and repaired himself for forty years, and the zither his grandfather, Olaf Erikssen, taught him to play. Any luxury more grandiose than their slightly larger than average 3 bedroom house would not have occurred to him to buy. </span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">But from the moment they were married in 1955, Fred’s wife made sure that every cent not devoted to home or car maintenance was tied up in Treasury Bonds and stocks: GE, GM, Coke, Chrysler, the Seven Sister oil companies, Conoco Energy, Boeing, Campbell Soup, Kellogg, IBM, Whirlpool, Proctor and Gamble, Detroit Steel, Studebaker, Collins Radio, National Sugar Refining, Zenith Electronics… Some of these investments went bad, but of course, most of them paid off quite spectacularly. All you had to do was buy the stock, not touch it for forty years, and you’d have enough money to feed a hundred generations of hearty Johansen folk who wouldn’t have to ever work again.If Fred ever realized that he was a multi-millionaire, he never gave much indication. Steve didn’t realize it either until his mother died and her will left him 18 million dollars in liquid assets. </span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">From the moment Steve turned seven in 1967, his mother watched his grades like a hawk; gave him extra math problems over meals, schlepped him across town for violin lessons, and bought him books with no subtle pressure that he should read, signed him up for every extra-curricular, occupied his empty moments with chores around the house. </span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Every Saturday from the move until Steve was thirteen, the two of them would go every Saturday to whatever movies were playing at the Chinese Theater. Different movies played there every week, usually in double features, from cartoons to subtitled foreign films. No matter how adult or violent, no matter how risque, no matter how intellectually challenging or B-movie dumb, the ritual was inviolate. Steve and his Mom would sit through it together. It was their ‘thing’, a way that Steve’s Mom could show that she trusted him, and perhaps an unspoken apology for driving him so hard. </span></div><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Steve eventually had to become a teenager like all teenagers, and became too old to regularly get caught with his Mom every Saturday. Sometimes they’d go, but Steve would usually try to get out of it. By the Saturday of Steve's Bar Mitzvah, their movies became just another chore his mother pressured him to complete. </span><br /><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Pressure was Denarius's adult life: yelling at Steve and Fred, complaining about them to cousins whom she knew tolerated her rather than liked her, loafing around a house with the soaps on the television while her husband was at work and come home to meals that were a pale shadow of what her mother could offer when they visited her in Pismo, let alone Fred's mother. The weekend smoking habit of Ivers Farms became a two-pack a day habit in Los Angeles, and Steve would complain endlessly about how the house would wreak and show his mother every newspaper article he found about how cigarettes can kill. His mother would simply shrug, and on this issue would ask for the privacy she never gave Steve, and Steve knew better than to ever point out the hypocrisy. </span><br /><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">When Steve got a girlfriend in Junior High, she banned the girl from their house and staked out near the girl's house in case Steve went over there. They had to meet in secret, but Lisa tired of the sneaking around and eventually went with the running back of Jr. High football team, Mike Johnson. When high school came around and Steve was a lanky six-foot nerd with aviator glasses and a too large nose, and in any event kept too busy by extra-ciricculars for romance, his mother would question him pointedly about why he didn't have a girlfriend and what he could do to make himself more attractive to women. </span><br /><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The first true explosion between Steve and Denarius had to wait until Steve was eighteen, when Steve's Mom insisted that he not major in the film school and get a practical major that could prepare him for work. "You knew that I wanted to go to the film school and you let me apply there so I would stay close to home. Now you tell me I can't go. You just want to keep running my life!" he said in a rare moment of drama and assertion against his mother that ended with the punctuation of a slammed door to his room, a Hollywood-like gesture</span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"> seen before or since in the Johanssen household</span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">. This all-too-rare moment of assertion from Steve was perceptive, more perceptive than Denarius would have guessed, but long experience taught him his mother's motives all too well. Of course this was her motive, and she didn't see what was wrong with it. Parents are there to guide their children. She didn't want Steve to turn out a wild animal like Annie-Jane, and what was the point of having children of she couldn't do better for him than she or Steve's family ever had. Children may disagree with the means, but they'll thank you in the end, and they'll know that you did what you did for their own good. For the week before college, Steve locked himself in his room and never came out. He snuck out through his window for dinner at McDonalds, and of course Denarius noticed, but against her better judgement, she took Fred's rare piece of advise to let him go. </span><br /><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Denarius was not impressed with Carmen. She was as impressed as anyone else with the stunning beauty that now hung around the Johanssen household, but Steve kept telling his mother how brilliant his fiance was, yet Denarius never saw the brilliance for herself. Carmen was quiet, she dressed a little trashy, she was helpful when it came to serving and doing the dishes, and Denarius was grateful for that. When she heard Carmen play the piano, she was vaguely impressed, but she attributed the wrong notes to a lack of practice and work ethic that was in fact due to neurological trauma. </span></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Steve did not dare tell his mother the truth of Carmen's condition until they were married and she was pregnant with Clarissa - knowing that his mother would accuse him of throwing away his future for a woman with such a serious condition, and no doubt would inveigh that Carmen brought these conditions upon herself due to her innate sluttishness. </span></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">But Steve's mother was in fact more understanding of it than he thought she would be. Burying her head in her hands and offering immediately to pay for any surgeries - the kind of debt which Steve would do anything to avoid. She explained, quite matter of factly, that had she known she would have advised him against the marriage in no uncertain terms and instantly knew that that was why Steve waited to tell her, but Carmen is now one of us and we take care of each other. </span></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">For years thereafter, Steve waited for his mother's explosion on Carmen which never came. His mother exploded plenty, </span></span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">but instead of using his marriage to Carmen as an example of his irresponsibility, Denarius would inevitably take Carmen's side - or at least what she thought to be Carmen's side:</span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"> when Steve embarked on his video store venture, "You have an unwell wife to take care of and you're going off to run a business that everybody knows will be a flop???" When Steve had a second daughter, she exploded again, not even because of his recent eviction but because "You're going to subject an orthopedically challenged wife to another pregnancy???"</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Denarius would note with alarm Carmen's every new slurring of speech, every slightly hesitant step, every sentence not finished, and would offer to come help around the house however often they needed. Steve and Carmen never took up Denarius's offer, but during the eighties she would show up unannounced for two evenings every week during which she'd insist on helping to straighten the house and cook dinner, and happily watched the grandchildren during those Saturday nights when Steve and Carmen went out with friends. During the eighties, she would occasionally try to get Steve and Carmen to come with the kids on Friday nights for Shabbos dinner, but they would inevitably leave after an hour-and-a-half, explaining to Steve's Mom that they had to get the kids to bed and the kids inevitably wake up in the car if they fall asleep first at her house. </span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Even when Steve's mother was at her most furious with him for his video store venture, she would call him most weekdays and talked to him for forty-five minutes. Steve would roll his eyes to his partner or the rare customer he had to handle, but he would always take the call and answered any questions she posed within the paragraphs of verbiage and shul gossip with an undertone of indulgent irony. </span></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Fred, whose pot belly grew exponentially after the move to LA, died of a heart attack in the winter of '93, a few months from retirement and the beginning of the whirlwind vacations Denarius was planning. About a month after he died were the LA riots, during which she braved the whirlwind of violence and traffic to come directly and </span></span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">unannounced to</span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"> Steve's house with a rifle and twenty pounds of dried goods to make sure that everybody was safe and well-fed. </span></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">It was shortly after the riots that Denarius noted a difference in how she was being received by Steve. The realization that she might be shut out of her son's life dawned upon her in gradual steps: pride her son was finally working hard, bemusement the work never let up, suspicion she was being avoided, alarm she was being shut out, devastation at the loss of her son. </span></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">It wasn't a total shutout. How could Steve completely shut his mother out of his life? But four calls a week became one call a week. Forty-five minutes became a half-hour, zealously guarded; or so Steve's mother believed. After five weeks, Steve's mother began to time him to see how long it would take before he would say he had to go. The goodbye would take five minutes as she inevitably recounted to him all the things she wanted him to do that week. On week six, the stopwatch said 29:35; week seven, 28:46; week eight, 27:54; week nine, 26:43, week ten, 25:37;, week eleven, 24:45. Once their talk time slipped below 25 minutes, she was positive she was being avoided. </span></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Steve's mother resolved to redouble her commitment to her son and his family, she showed up unannounced at Steve's gate three evenings during the work week instead of her customary two. She would show up at precisely five in the afternoon with dinner and desert in tow, just as their nanny was bringing the kids home through the door from school, so that the nanny wouldn't clog her grandchildren's arteries every day with Pepian, a spicy Guatemalan stew with all its fried cornmeal and shredded pork.</span></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">One day, after Steve and Carmen came home from babysitting, she was talking to Steve after the kids and Carmen went to bed, and said she wanted to talk to him about how often she came to the house. Steve also wanted to talk about it. Denarius wanted to come over four times a week, Steve wanted her to come over two. </span></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Steve: The kids need to concentrate on schoolwork.</span></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Mother: Is my help for them not good enough?</span></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Steve: It's fine, they just think you're too strict.</span></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Mother: They think I'm too strict? Did you ever tell them how I was with you?</span></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Steve: Let's not use that metric.</span></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Mother: What metric? They have to get good grades and they've inherited their father's lazy gene. </span></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Steve: I don't want to make my kids lives more stressful than they already are.</span></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Mother: What's stressful about them?</span></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Steve: Cleo's miserable in school. </span></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Mother: I'm sure she is, you're letting her gain weight hand over fist. Of course, if you didn't move out to Orange County with all these shallow people she might not have such a problem. </span></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Steve: Mom, kids are kids, and I just want to let my kids have some fun if they can. </span></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Mother: They can have fun and still learn some discipline. </span></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Steve: Yeah but Cleo says you're raising your voice whenever she puts down a wrong answer. You don't have to do that, do you?</span></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Mother: Math is important! It saved your life!</span></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Steve: Math is important, but it's not so important that you have to make Cleo cry. </span></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Mother: I didn't mean to make her cry. She just wasn't paying attention! She needed to stay focused!</span></span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Steve: Look Mom, you just need to be a little nicer. To her, to us. Sometimes I think you're always under a lot of stress because you're lonely, maybe it's time to start going out and meeting new people. Have you thought about dating? It's been more than two years.. </span></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Mother: (cutting Steve off) ..I'm not lonely! I'm just taking care of my responsibilities!</span></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Steve: Mom, sometimes I think you don't need to be so responsible.</span></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Mother: Who's gonna be responsible if I'm not?</span></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Steve: We can be perfectly responsible when you're not here. </span></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Mother: And where's the evidence of that?</span></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Steve: That's unfair Mom. </span></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Mother: You do nothing but put your happiness first. You try to go to film school rather than get a real degree, I have to make you go into finance. You leave your accounting to operate a video store that everybody knows will go belly up, and I have to find an apartment for your family and pay for your wife's surgeries out of pocket. </span></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Steve: Come on Mom, you were already paying for those before I got the video store.</span></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Mother: That's supposed to make me feel better?!?</span></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Steve: I'm sorry you feel that way Mom but nobody's stopping you from being a little more selfish. Everybody wants you to be happy. </span></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Mother: I'm happy when I'm with you and your family! I'm happy at my Temple and what would make me really happy is if you came to temple more often with the girls! </span></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Steve: We can talk about that another time Mom.</span></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Mother: Always another time. You always put me off. </span></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Steve: When have I ever put you off? I see you four times a week! We talk on the phone all the time!</span></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Mother: You barely talk to me on the phone anymore! We used to talk four times a week for forty-five minutes. Now you can only talk once a week and you can't even talk a half-hour! I timed it!</span></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Steve: You timed it?</span></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Mother: I had the suspicion that you were trying to get me off the phone after a half-hour, so I've timed it for the last five weeks, and you're not letting the conversation go more than a half-hour. </span></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Steve: Do you have any idea how absurd that sounds? </span></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Mother: Do you have any idea how absurd it is that we talk so little anymore?</span></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Steve: I'm hard at work, I'm making money, I have a family, it's exactly what you always wanted from me. Even if it's true, who cares? We still see each other four times a week!</span></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Mother: So you're deliberately hanging up on me after a half-hour?</span></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Steve: I have to work! What's the big deal?</span></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Mother: I don't have anybody else! I've got my friends from Temple and a few cousins. Who else am I supposed to talk to?</span></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Steve: I thought you said you weren't lonely. </span></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Mother: I'm not lonely if I'm doing things for people I care about!</span></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Steve: Are you saying that the things you do for us are really for you?</span></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Mother: How can you say that?!</span></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Steve: I'm just saying that's what it sounds like you're saying.</span></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Mother: The things I do for you are for you! Family is my biggest priority!</span></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Steve: It's mine too!</span></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Mother: Is it really? You spend less time with your children than I do! </span></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Steve: I'm at work till late, things have to get done! Carmen is with them, and whatever she can't do anymore the nanny does. </span></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Mother: The nanny does... That's a nice thing a person does whose priority is family, pawning them off on a stranger because your wife can't properly look after her children. </span></span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Steve: That's really not fair Mom. Emely is great with the kids! </span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Mother: A mother be the one looking after her kids, and if she can't because you chose to marry somebody with a mental handicap, the grandma should look after them! </span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Steve: Mom that's a terrible thing to say about Carmen and I'd really like you to apologize. </span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Mother: All I said was the truth. Carmen is mentally handicapped and you chose to marry her anyway. And now we all have to sacrifice to make up for what she can't do.</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Steve: Mom, I hired a nanny to help Carmen out. Nobody is asking you to sacrifice anything.</span><br /><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Mother: I want to sacrifice. I just wish you didn't make me. </span><br /><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Steve: I'm not making you!</span><br /><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Mother: Of course you're making me! You married a stupid woman with a pretty face and now I have to look after her!</span><br /><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Steve: Carmen is not stupid and she's not just a pretty face. Carmen has, is, and will always be the woman of my dreams. She's my reason for living! What was I supposed to do? Not marry her?</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Mother: Yes! That's exactly what you're supposed to not do! Do you honestly think your Dad was the person I dreamed about? You honestly think I wanted to spend forty years talking cars and zithers? But your father was a good man, a sweet man who did everything he was ever asked to do! I married him because I knew he would give his kids the best possible life, and he did. And what did you do with the life he gave you? You use the best possible life to marry a pretty girl who's mentally retarded!"</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Steve, as ever, never really challenged his mother. He simply indulged her until she decided to leave, and then resolved that he would never see her again. </span></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Johanson family, like 4 million other California families of the 90's, lived in a gated community. For the first week, Steve simply instructed security to not let his mother car into the community. She knew this plan would only last a week until his mother either found a way to harangue the security guard into letting her in or find a way to climb the gate. </span></span><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Living on a six acre property with a massive garage in their 5,400 square foot mansion, Steve and Carmen had barely ever met their neighbors. Their neighbors might have seen Steve's mother's Ford Taurus station wagon pull into the driveway, but even if neighbors saw her pull in, her car would disappear behind a twisted, winding, downwardly sloping driveway into a veritable forest of sugar pines before the car would disappear from the sugar pines into a garage that could hold five cars. </span><br /><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">So that first week, Steve went door to door to all sixty houses of his development to instruct his neighbors to beware of a high-strung woman in her early sixties who was stalking his family. The neighbors all seemed like very nice people, many of whom invited him into their house for an hour of conversation. The Jewish couples would serve him coffee and cake, the black couples would serve him wine and cheese, the goyisher wives would get him a beer. They were all lovely people, and he never socialized with any of them ever again. </span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Surely enough, Steve's mother was spotted by neighbors, pants full of soot, shirt torn at the belly, bleeding from her arms. She was detained by the police as a vagrant. She called Steve to bail her out, but Steve would not answer. She was kept in a cell at the police station for four days. </span></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Steve also left very specific phone instructions. He instructed his secretary to tell his mother he wasn't in however many times she called. For seven weeks, she called every hour of the workday, on the hour, to ask if he was back yet. In three years, he never gave his mother his unlisted private office number, yet after two weeks of his not returning calls, his mother located the number and demanded from the first sentence why he was refusing to speak to her. Steve hung up immediately and left his phone off the hook for the next nine months. </span></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">The daughters were strictly told to never answer the phone; not that it mattered, because Elizabeth was four, and Cleo had no friends to call. The nanny was told to simply hang up if it were Steve's mother. And Carmen, by the way, was having so much neurological trouble by this point that she rarely remembered how to use a phone. </span></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">After four months of calling every day, and thirteen attempts to get onto Steve's property, Denarius gave up calling. A month later, she found out she had stage 3 lung cancer. Seven months after that, she had died without calling Steve anything. Her synagogue supervised the funeral, and there were no mourners for whom to hold a shiva house, so her shul and cousins davened mincha and maariv at her cemetery, shoveled some dirt onto her grave, and went home.</span></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">It was only when the executor came to the house that Steve found out. His mother was dead and not only had he inherited eighteen million dollars, and his daughters both stood to inherit a trust of 162 million dollars each when they turned 18 for which he was the executor. Steve was already worth $11 million, it's not like this news made him eat better than he ever did before, but how in God's name did the Johansen family, all of whose possessions were repossessed less than a decade earlier, stand at a net worth of $353 million? </span></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></span><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /></div>Evan Tuckerhttps://plus.google.com/101333496816879280258noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5120202207964289878.post-67751948771453112632016-11-15T01:30:00.004-05:002016-11-15T01:30:55.094-05:00Tales From the Old New Land: Just Steve (90something %)<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And having a playback memory, Carmen remembered something about copying down everything he said that sounded vaguely like a reference to Isaiah 8:1, and recorded every word of what he said for fear that he'd demand of her why she did not comply with the order he gave mid-binge/tirade to record these pearls of wisdom. In fact, she did it immediately after he let her go from the ledge. She kept a copy of it on her person every day of her life, in case the Producer ever returned and demanded to see it.</span></div><span id="docs-internal-guid-091f4024-a147-1ba2-0aae-f70cf612e448" style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Producer and Carmen slugged on after that night for another sixteen months. When Carmen finally became Steve's, she was more radiantly beautiful than ever before for two whole decades, and considering the dangers she'd passed, one could argue that she was still more beautiful inside than out. Nevertheless, her ribs had the consistency of crushed ice, her joints bent in manners no human being should, the simple act of arising from her bed was pain itself. Among those who'd experienced repetitive trauma, it is not uncommon to deal with the constant rebreaking of bones, degenerative disc disease and an eventual lumbar spinal fusion; bone spurs, torn ligaments, degenerative arthritis, staff infections from corrective surgeries. And that's only from the effects from before he started to hit her face.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This is mercifully not a story in which to discuss the particulars of tyrannical behavior which cause such internal horror. This narrator has neither the patience nor nothing like the fortitude to speak in any more than generalities about the abominations perpetrated upon Carmen and he beseeches your forgiveness for his need to speak any further of these depravities. But if this fictional rendering of a single Hollywood player getting off on the scent of blood has anything like the ring of veracity to you, then he asks you to at least consider how many thousands there may have been over the past century of powerful Hollywood men who've acted precisely like this.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This particular apparition of a Producer knew on the night of this "window dressing" (his charming term for what transpired that dawn) that his days as a respected Hollywood player could be counted with two digits. Don't mind us the circumstances of his ignominy, there were any number of risible cinematic bombs in the late 70's and early 80's which wiped out Hollywood producers, production companies, and whole studios:</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">There was At Long Last Love, Peter Bogdanovich's trivial homage to 30's movie-musicals, Cole Porter songs, and Ernst Lubitsch romantic comedies - because nothing oozes Golden Age Hollywood class quite like Burt Reynolds, who became a superstar a few years previously when Deliverance allowed us to watch him kill a Georgia hillbilly with a crossbow while the hillbilly sodomized a 300 pound Ned Beatty as Ned's ordered to squeal like a pig. There was The Exorcist II: The Heretic, a shameless money grab of a sequel starring a miserable looking Richard Burton during a period when he looked like he was taking parts in horrible movies just so he could pay his astronomical bar tab. There was The Swarm, a horror movie about killer bees that starred Michael Caine, Henry Fonda, Richard Widmark, and Olivia de Havilland - because what everybody wanted to see in the late 70's was the biggest stars of 1945 in a horror movie with a plot too absurd for Roger Corman to film. There was I Spit On Your Grave - a film that couldn't even find distribution for two years because of its quarter-hour depictions (notice the plural) of gang rape. There was X-rated Caligula, a movie made through the combined talents of literary lion Gore Vidal and Bob Guccione - publisher of Penthouse Magazine, who simply wanted to record a literal rendering of the depraved events within the Roman Emperor Caligula's palace in Tacitus's Annals. Every imaginable degradation seemed to find its way into the script; raping a bride on her wedding day - and her groom, sex shows involving children and the deformed (if you don't believe me, watch it), gladiatorial public execution, and a confusing scene for which poor Helen Mirren has to use what is hopefully a prosthetic vaginal cavity to depict herself giving birth as part of a (literally) execrable performance within all these execrable performances. After seeing the original cut, Guccione decided that audiences weren't getting their money's worth, and insisted on inserting a forty-five minute bisexual orgy near the end which the Roman Senators and their wives are coerced into having.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">There was, of course, Heaven's Gate, which lost 30 million dollars, ran to nearly four hours in original cut, deliberately killed a horse with explosives, was yanked from movie theaters after less than a week, and bankrupted United Artists - according to most experts the greatest of all movie studios - forever. Some swear it's a misunderstood masterpiece, this narrator doesn't want to find out... Of course, it has a ten minute rape scene...</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">There was Inchon, the B-Movie hagiography for America's Five-Star General in Asia, and for a moment in 1952 America's would-be dictator, Douglas MacArthur. Financed with no expense spared by a combination of the United States Military and world's most infamous cult leader, the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, with MacArthur played by the world's greatest actor - the ailing Lord Lawrence Olivier - for a cool million bucks, and directed by Terrance Young, who made the first few James Bond movies. MacArthur's closest confidante was played by Richard Roundtree, the original Shaft. Who'd have conceived that a movie of such disparate parts would come unglued?</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">There was Tarzan, the Ape Man - in which a mythical White Ape turns out to be a white man raised by apes and therefore must be brought back to civilisation in England where he can be taught proper discourse. Nevertheless, he retains the animal sexual magnetism of Africa, which overwhelms poor proper and prim Jane. Tarzan's character was found offensive by some in the 1910's when he first appeared, imagine the reception by 1981. Yet somehow, there've since been another six Tarzan movies.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And who can, or should, forget George Lucas's Howard the Duck? A PG live-action movie in which a loveable alien duck gets transported through a wormhole to our world. In the course of the movie, he gets dumped by a club bouncer into a hot tub where a couple is having sex, a human that turns out to be an alien who has a tongue that seems to extend like an erection in the presence of Lea Thompson, Howard's duckbill attempts to bite the ass of a sixty-something black woman whose onion-like posterior he finds quite stimulating, he excitedly opens Playduck Magazine in which we see a photo of a duck with curves and hair and feathered white nipples (later in the movie we see duck boobies with pink human nipples), the Cleveland Police Department sexually assaults Howard the Duck, and actor Jeffrey Jones (himself now a convicted sex offender) walks in on Lea Thompson seducing Howard the Duck.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And, of course, Ishtar. The only of these risible and bank-busting movies directed by a woman, and the only one whose director never directed a movie again. Perhaps Ishtar was, truly, the last movie of the Old-New Hollywood - directed by Mike Nichols's old comic partner Elaine May, Dustin Hoffman and Warren Beatty starring, Vittorio Storaro (Coppola and Bertolucci's cinematographer of choice) doing the photography, co-starring New Hollywood luminaries like Tess Harper who was Robert Duvall's wife in Tender Mercies, Charles Grodin who grew up in an Orthodox family, Jack Weston who was once Jack Weinstein, Carol Kane who played Woody's first wife in Annie Hall and an Oscar nominee for a part in Hester Street that she acted entirely in Yiddish, an Israeli named Aharon Ipale, Fred Melamed who is best known for his portrayal of Sy Ableman in A Serious Man, and David Margulies who was practically Hollywood's character actor of choice when you needed a Jew. Is it any wonder that a film bombed that had so many Jews involved whose scenario was in an Arab country? </span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Something rotted in that air of freedom which made the New Hollywood Golden Age possible. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. It was inevitable that the freedom which allowed for realistic depictions of ordinary people with their ugliness intact, with sex, and violence, and emotional turmoil unshielded by a production code, would curdle into freedom's betrayal by making its depictions into something sickeningly exploitative - sometimes freedom's very liberators betrayed it. In the case of Hollywood, what appeared to be a glorious liberation turned out to be merely another swing of the pendulum that landed on equilibrium for a moment before swinging into decadence. Today's Hollywood has a new production code, a code that allows for rivers of blood so long as the violence is confined to an unrealistic genre and its human consequences softpedaled, a code that allows for the naive innocence of children to continue unabated into adulthood with bro comedies about manchildren, a code which only allows romantic comedies in which love's ugly moments are airbrushed out of existence, a code dominated by action movies for which the stars are the special effects. Just as in the old production code, today's Hollywood movies can still be damn good, but in the opinion of this clearly not humble enough narrator, almost none of them show us ourselves. There are ways around the problem - movies like The Social Network and Her and WALL-E and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which only show us a complex image of the human spirit by showing us how technology may have completely reshaped it; or movies like Boyhood or the Before movies or (believe it or not) Borat, in all of which the experimental gimmick that makes them possible is so radically extreme that they can only be done once and never be copied. There are some very fine and human directors working in Hollywood's orbit if not actually 'in' Hollywood: there are at least two American treasures: Alexander Payne and Richard Linklater, both of whom manage in every movie to say something new and elusive about America. Among the 'tribe', there's Jason Reitman, or at least was, who made three of the great American movies at the beginning of his career with Thank You For Smoking, Juno, and Up In The Air, all three of which manage to say something new and elusive about America, and there's John Sayles, whom nobody remembers anymore, but twenty years ago was the God of Independent American Film. There's Ang Lee, who isn't even American, but easily beats Americans at their own game. And of course, there's Errol Morris, the documentarian who makes movies so utterly different from everyone else's that you shouldn't even call them movies by the accepted definition. </span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Other than them, there are, as Woody once called them, the Academy of the Overrated: Tarantino, the Coen Brothers, David Lynch, PT Anderson, Wes Anderson (whom in all fairness seems to be improving), Spike Jonze, Charlie Kaufmann, David Fincher, Christopher Nolan, Steven Soderbergh (who at least tries to be more ambitious), Sofia Coppola, Peter Jackson, Ken Burns (it takes a rare talent to make the subjects of his documentaries boring), David O Russell, the Wachowskis, Gus Van Sant, Tim Burton, James Cameron... </span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">These are directors so enamored of movies that they jam pack their movies with references to other movies and forget to put references to life in them. Perhaps that statement is unfair, there are exceptions in every one of their outputs, but the exceptions are very few compared to the misfires. There is a kind of ersatz profundity to their movies - movies like The Matrix and Inception and Avatar and I Heart Huckabees (a movie I used to love) with philosophical messages that can fit inside a fortune cookie; a ponderousness which PT Anderson mistakes for profundity, an incomprehensibility which Charlie Kaufmann mistakes for intellectual challenge, a cynical darkness which David Fincher and the Coen Brothers mistake for gravity, an arrested development which Tim Burton and Wes Anderson mistaken for whimsy, a reliance on CGI which Christopher Nolan and the Wachowskis and James Cameron mistake for visual artistry (because in their movies, it's the technicians who are the artists, not the director), a reliance on other movies which Tarantino and David Lynch mistake for ironic commentary. In each of these cases, the problem is that they're weighted down by the baggage of movie history. The movies before them were simply too good, so rather than try to compete with them catharsis for catharsis, they dodge the challenge and instead create homages to what older masters did better than they did, and many critics call these postmodern homages 'original' when the only thing that's original about them is their lack of emotional demand on the audience. These are movies about movies, and therefore perhaps they're movies against movies. Most alarmingly, and prevalent to nearly all of them, are the movies that mistake technology for humanity. Even among the directors unaddicted to CGI, there are more breathtaking shots in today's American movies than ever before. If nature doesn't give you the background you want, if the lighting on some actress's face is not quite what you want, if her jawline is not quite the way you'd like it, you can digitally alter it to any specification you like; but to what end? Today's auteurs have utterly mastered the technical end of filmmaking, and perhaps because we've mastered technique, we've forgotten what the technique is for. &nbsp;</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Meanwhile, people who've devoted their whole lives to film tell us that the world is experiencing a cinematic Golden Age of which the United States is the only first world country who remains excluded. As with so many things about Contemporary America - soccer, news, public transit, languages, condoms, history, black humor, cheap health care, gun laws, and vegetables - we have in America only the dimmest awareness of the feast that often seems to happen in every corner of the globe but ours because we're too busy playing with our toys. </span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Special effects are the new stars of Hollywood. The highest grossing movies are no longer character based movies like The Godfather or Bonnie and Clyde or Midnight Cowboy or Easy Rider or American Graffiti or Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid or The Sting or One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest or MASH or Fiddler on the Roof or Patton. There were plenty of smaller, character driven films during these years that did well, but it was between 1975 and 1990 that technology become the undisputed box office king, and after that came the systematic gutting of movies that portrayed Americans in their natural state in anywhere but independent film and the Miramax ghetto. Just over the other side of 1975 lay the Star Wars Trilogy and Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Indiana Jones and ET and Back to the Future and Roger Rabbit - and how human and full of personality do those early Spielberg and Lucas and Zemeckis movies seem next to the high-grossing movies of our time! Would it surprise anyone that Tom Cruise or Chris Hemsworth or Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson were actually computer programs or robots that only exist on a screen? There was even an Al Pacino movie about that exact notion fifteen years ago called Simone. Maybe Jennifer Lawrence is just an updated Simone, an indication that these computer avatars have improved to the point that seem so like us humans that perhaps humans are indistinguishable now from robots!</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This New New Hollywood came into existence because the knowledge that movies like Caligula and I Spit On Your Grave and Heaven's Gate and Howard the Duck gave us of what we were capable of was too terrible. The freedom to create greater and more uplifting spectacles can also give us things too vile and revolting for contemplation. All it took was less than a dozen movies in which the human animal was presented to us undeniably in all its stinking shit, and the movie world's been running away from its truth ever since.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Our dearly beloved Producer could have been working on any of these movies, it doesn't matter which, but by the same time the next year, The Producer hadn't worked on a movie for nine months; nine months during which his fists literally performed an abortion on Carmen. Perhaps it became his sole source of satisfaction and relief, because for six months, no glamorous friend returned a call, relieving him not only of his own glamor but the sycophants who glommed onto it. Friendship is fleeting, love mere folly, but how much more true would that be when living in a place known as the 'Dream Factory?' But f</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">ive minutes after every time he went off, he begged her not to leave, just you wait, he'll make you happy again, Hollywood can be something better than its ever been, and you'll be its leading lady!</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Then there was the time the Producer bruised her father up after her father asked about Carmen's bruises. Two minutes later, he gave her Dad a $10,000 wad of cash, then drove him to the emergency room personally in his 1977 Lamborghini Countach. The moment he got through the door, he took out more wads of cash for the doctor and nurses and the other patients - they saw nothing. And while they were in the ER, Carmen's sister practically kidnapped her to a courthouse to make her get a restraining order. Carmen was unwilling, worried she was about to get killed. If not by her producer, then by the guys he'd pay to keep her quiet. The judge listened very patiently and carefully and evinced great compassion for her suffering, he then excused himself to his chamber for five minutes, came back and refused the restraining order. Twelve minutes later, the Producer was at the courthouse, gave Carmen a huge hug and kiss as she sobbed her tears upon him, took her home and told her over and over again how much he loved her. Two days later, they were engaged, and she was the one who wanted to go to the courthouse right away; but he promised her a wedding the whole world would know about, the wedding she deserved.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Who could turn down the life he promised? This was a man who knew how to turn the curvature of the Earth to the precise angle he wanted. He was the best actor in Hollywood. For more than a decade, he dealt with creative geniuses every day of his life, but he was a genius of life itself. Every event, the most glamorous, the most spiritual, the most transcendent, the most intangible, could be picked apart and reduced to a transaction. Nothing in life was a mystery to him, and all he demanded in return was that she be no more complicated to understand than the concierge in Oviedo.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Even so, no matter how much of a genius he was, in order to have that wedding, he had to be back in the good graces of Hollywood, and in order to return to Hollywood's graces, he had to be in the graces of multinationals who bought Hollywood up.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It was just at this moment that our dear Producer, whose tastes in cuisine had always seemed tending to the upscale LA specialties of shellfish, steak, and sushi, seemed to develop a yen for rouladen, kasespatzle, saurbraten, kartoffelknodel, bretzels and wurst. Carmen had no idea why the Producer wanted them to go for German every night, and of course he wouldn't explain except to say that there was a different dish he wanted them to try. One night at Old World German Restaurant, the next at Van Nuys German Deli (a standup counter place for which he still insisted that Carmen wear heels), the next at Alpine Village, and the same rotation every night for five or six weeks. Within a month, the Producer was a good twenty pounds heavier, but the moment Carmen's dress seemed a bit tighter, the Producer did what he could to make her not finish what he ordered for them. She would wrap the remains up and take home what remained in a doggie bag, then find them missing from the fridge the next morning.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">About five to six weeks in, the Producer pointed to a table across the restaurant. "That's Karlheinz von Huntze, Executive Vice-President of Polygram Entertainment." Until the 60's, Polygram was a third-German, third-Dutch, third-British corporation responsible for no less than seven of the world's major classical music labels and another ten of the world's major Popular Music labels. A number of these labels were all too happy to collaborate with Hitler's culture ministers in times gone by, but Polygram controlled a vast swath of the great musical glories of the gramophone - glories set down before, during, and after the Second World War: Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Earl Hines, Dizzy Gillespe, Woody Herman, Charlie Parker, Bill Evans, Stan Getz, Oscar Petersen, Lester Young, Billie Holiday, Eartha Kitt, untold numbers of Broadway Musicals, Patsy Cline, Loretta Lynn, George Jones, the Rolling Stones and Elvis during some of their best periods, Eric Clapton, Talking Heads, the Ramones, KISS, Billy Joel, Donna Summer, the Village People, the Bee Gees, ABBA, The Osmonds, Yves Montand, Jacques Brel, Edith Piaff, and hundreds of other pop music acts; nearly every major mid-century orchestral conductor, untold numbers of great classical soloists and opera singers and chamber ensembles, the premiere recordings of every postwar work by Benjamin Britten and Ralph Vaughan Williams, untold numbers of moderately obscure and young and unproven composers whom no major label today would take a chance on, the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, the Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam, the London Symphony Orchestra, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra... In 1963, it was Polygram's by then long since subsidiary, the Dutch Phillips Electronics (founded by Karl Marx's uncle), that invented the tape cassette.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">By 1980, Polygram was surely too big to fail, and yet... its catalogue was simply too large, and it had to either expand significantly to make up for its losses, or shed an enormous part of its product. Since there was very little in music of which they didn't own a significant portion, it was time to move into Movies. What better way to do that than Movie Musicals? Polygram had a 50% share in RSO Records, which gave them a huge profit in the Disco market because RSO Records had the music distribution rights to Grease and Saturday Night Fever. This was in addition to the money made from their contracts with the Bee Gees and the Village People and Donna Summer. Unfortunately, this was nowhere near enough to cover their bill. They needed a movie musical of their own.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Enter Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band... THE MUSICAL! Yes, all the Beatles hits are here, sung as you've always wanted to hear them sung by Peter Frampton, the Bee Gees, and Steve Martin. With cameos from Aerosmith, Alice Cooper, Earth Wind &amp; Fire, Dr. John, Etta James, Curtis Mayfield, Bonnie Raitt, Frankie Valli, and a hundred other musicians - none of which sing their original music, and narrated by George fucking Burns (now there's a name that'll put the young asses in the seats...). God knows how many hundreds of millions Polygram had to pay to acquire the rights for them from EMI, but it was just another couple hundred million pulled down the drain of this spectacular musical black hole. Ever the artistes, John and George refused to even attend the premiere, no doubt they took the money though; while ever the workhorses, Paul and Ringo went to the premiere, then refused to have anything more to do with the movie, or with Polygram.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And there sits Karlheinz von Huntze, all sixty-seven years and 350 pounds of him squeezed into a fecally brown suit that probably fit him when he was fifty-five with a badly tied thin tie that didn't reach his naval, unashamed of his brown teeth and double chin that went past his neck, all of which bit with great begeisterung into the giant plate of braten and sauerkraut in front of him, yet vain enough about his hair to wear a spectacularly bad salt and pepper toupee whose base seemed to levitate an inch and a half over his boneless skull and continue six inches up. On his left hand, a wedding ring seems as though it might at any moment pop off his brat-like finger.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So this was it... The perfect movie musical star - a gorgeously unique looking petite girl with a large head, already well known and liked by everybody in Hollywood, packed to the gills with brains and lungs; no singing lessons necessary, no acting lessons necessary, minimal dancing, can play piano, knows every jazz standard in the Real Book. All it takes is one movie, then she has her choice - greatest living singer or greatest living actress? It's needless to say who's on her arm and advising her every decision.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And of course, she's brilliant when she talks to Huntze. Within ninety seconds, the Producer excuses himself to the bathroom and seems to stay in there for forty minutes. She speaks to him in the fluent German she picked up from her opera training, they compare the Schubert and Goethe they love best, they sing the Papageno and Pamina duet from Mozart's Die Zauberflote at the table (the restaurant bursts into applause, more for Carmen...). He orders four different deserts, and insists on splitting each of them with her and that she eat up her half to the every mouthful. He gives her a standing invitation to visit him and his wife in Hamburg so she can see the Kunsthalle and the Dichterhallen and walk through the taverns where the young Brahms played, and tells her that he'd love to hear her play piano before he leaves town. He writes down an address of a private residence of a freund at who's place he's staying.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Of course, very little piano was played. Someone already as thoroughly demoralized as Carmen has no illusions left of the necessities expected of her. If anything, she was thankful for Herr Huntze's patronizing kindness. The cutesy/schatzi German nicknames he gave her, the grandfatherly forcefeeding of Stroh and Obstwasser before geschlechtich verkehren and makronen afterward (which of course came to her mouth via his boneless hand). He told her she was a shoo-in, all she had to do was meet with a few more people at Polygram and they'd make a musical as a vehicle for her! </span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It is, of course, needless to tell you that something similar was expected at every new meeting with every member of the Polygram team: Germans, Austrians, Swiss, Dutch, Danish... Old world gentlemen all of them, their courtly manners justifying their sense of entitlement to the world. A few of them were quite attractive - tall, silver-haired gentlemen with immaculately tailored three-piece suits surrounding dark paisley ties or ascots tucked into perfectly pressed shirts; sculpted hair and pencil-thin mustaches above the thin and constantly pursed lips that smoked long thin cigarettes; they wore scarves in the summer and walked with ornate canes - even the young ones seemed old. The bald ones generally had combovers with more mousse than hair, the fat ones always had watch chains on their vests. Never would she leave without an extremely expensive gift - a Channel perfume, a Swarovski Chocolate Box, a De Beer diamond ring, a dress from Christian Dior (and of course, the measurements were perfect). When meeting her at the door they would bend down and kiss her on the hand, or kiss her on each cheek, sometimes three times rather than two. Conversation was always quite pleasant, the meals were always the height of gourmet and gourmand, the wines they picked were amazing (at least when they weren't German...), and occasionally they even flew her to Germany. Karlheinz even got her to the Dichterhallen.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Producer seemed strangely OK with all this. He never asked her where she was going, gave her free use of whatever car she wanted, and he seemed happier than he'd ever been in their relationship. He was on the phone 18 hours a day, his old friends were his friends again, and during that month when she was in meetings and gaining nearly thirty pounds from all the decadent dishes she'd eaten - which made outfits much tighter and her curves still more alluring - his life was back to a whirlwind of tennis, power lunches, movie pitches from him, and movie pitches to him.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Early in the evening of September 19th, which they both vaguely remembered in the back of their minds was Kol Nidrei Night, Carmen returned to the house to find every light in the house on, the mirrors covered, the unshaven Producer wearing what looked like a white bathrobe and a fisherman's cap on his head, but all of the cap but the bill was covered by a blindingly white shawl with blue stripes over his head. Carmen knew that it was obviously a tallis, but her Producer never gave any indication of being so Orthodox to wear one that long. He was standing in the corner of his living room, his back to the wall, bending his torso up and down at the speed of sound as he read from a black book while his lips moved with barely any sound at all at the speed of light. He didn't even seem to notice her, and as she walked in his line of vision, she saw that not only was he wearing his favorite tie, but the tie was cut in the middle, almost the entire way through.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Before she could even ask what was wrong, he looked at her and emphatically intoned:</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">"Vahyigah hadawvawr el meylekh nineveh mikis'aw va'yo'aw'ver ahdahrtaw meyawlawv."</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And then he began to walk directly towards her, staring her deadly cold in the eye and taking a step a few inches forward with every seven words:</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">"For the word came unto the King of Nineveh and he arose from his throne and he laid his throne from him and covered him with sackcloth and sat in ashes and he caused it to be proclaimed and published through Nineveh by the decree of the King and his nobles saying let neither man nor beast nor herd nor flock taste any thing let them not feed nor drink water but let man and beast be covered with sackcloth and cry mightily unto Adonai yea let them turn every one from his evil way and from the violence that is in their hands."</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">He then stared at his hand for a moment that seemed like fifteen, as unaware as she was about what he was about to do.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">"You didn't get the part."</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And then he dislodged her cornea.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">-----------------------------------------------------</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This is the last we will ever say of the particulars of physical abuses perpetrated upon Carmen, and while he can make no promises, the narrator very much hopes that this is the last time he feels the need to elucidate any details of gendered violence in what will hopefully become a mega/meta-novel that takes decades to write for many, many hundreds of pages, if ever. We do, however, have to speak rather lengthily about the repercussions of what was perpetrated upon Carmen, but fortunately, the details of that will proceed organically from the story - with some digressions of course...</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">"Of course you can stay at my place. However long you need to. I hope you don't mind though, my housemate has a friend staying on our sofa but my room has a foldout couch."</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Steve lets Carmen in, they walk into his room, she sees the 250 books on his shelves, she sees the violin case on the fold-out couch, she sees the projector screen covering the window and the projector at the far end of the room with a pile of classic movie canisters as tall as she is; the proverbial cat is out of the bag and she breaks down weeping. Steve holds Carmen to console her, but he has no idea what he's consoling, and while he asks, he's not about to push the matter.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">When Carmen finally feels better, she walks over to the canisters, picks out Casablanca, and for two hours they lie down and decide that the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world... It's a Monday night. On Tuesday, they watch The Best Years of Our Lives. On Wednesday, It's A Wonderful Life. Thursday, City Lights. Friday, It Happened One Night. Saturday, &nbsp;The Philadelphia Story. Sunday, Steve finally shows her his favorite movie: Sunrise; meaning not that his favorite movie is somewhere between a pretentious statement about nature and a pickup line, but Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans, the 1927 masterpiece co-awarded the first ever Best Picture Oscar (even in the first year of the Oscars they could award it all to the best movie...) and a movie that should reduce every living being to a puddle of feelings by its end. It was directed by F.W. Murnau, a young German moviemaker recently immigrated to the United States, who might have proven greater than either Hitchcock or Welles had a car accident not claimed him four years later.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">On this, Steve and I completely agree, Sunrise is more than a simply great film. To me it is, next to Citizen Kane, nothing less than the cornerstone of all movies ever made in this country. The dawn at the end of Sunrise is not simply a metaphor for the dawn of a reinvigorated rural marriage, it is a metaphor for the American dawn, for the dawn of movies themselves, for the dawn of witnessing art enacted for us by our fellow humans on a durable screen rather than in our imaginations from a flimsy piece of paper; for the dawn of a modern era when the hope of the New World emerges from the despair of the Old - for the passing of the torch from a world that once coveted Northern European ideals like civilization, education, and culture, to a world that coveted American ideals like life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Perhaps these new ideals will prove equally unfulfillable to the old ones, but not yet at least, and while there's no doubt that it's hokey to say that the Sun rose on a new day with this movie, it's no less true for being hokey.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It's probably worth mentioning that some night after one of these movies, they have sex for the first time, and perhaps nearly as importantly, Steve has sex for the first time; this era was a few years before it became a given that 95% of students would lose their virginity by the end of college. I'd like to say that they first did it after they watched "It Happened One Night," but that is much too on the nose...</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Steve, like most men, particularly most young men who've never had sex before, has no idea what might cause women discomfort, even if it might seem obvious to them in distant retrospect. It somehow never occurred to him that even a woman as intelligent as Carmen might dislike a movie in which a man who attempts to work up the nerve to drown his pure, Aryan-looking country wife (you can tell how innocent she is by her long blond hair wrapped in a tight bun) so he can take up full time with his knowing city tramp of a mistress with a nose slightly too large to not escape a semitic connotation, but if that's not enough to get the point, you can tell how 'knowing' she is from her black hair cut into a flapper haircut...), whom he also tries to kill when she suggests killing his wife to him - but </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">both times, being the splendidly ethical man he is at heart, </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">he manages to stop himself, and after his nearly killing the two women closest to him in twenty minutes, he resolves to redeem himself because of the purity of his wife's being and sufferance in his ignoring her, his wandering eye, and his bad mind for business that puts their country farm in danger. </span><br /><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">After he stands over her, his hands lurched outward in the manner of exaggerated silent movie murderousness as he attempts to work up the murderous nerve to throw her overboard from a canoe on a lake, she waits for her coward of a husband to row back ashore so she can abscond to a bus heading to the city, and he runs after her, begging her not to be afraid of him. She can't escape the iron grip of a husband a foot taller and wider in frame, and as he holds onto her, they wander into a city church, and they watch and listen as a clearly Lutheran priest officiates an expensive city wedding and intones from a cue card "God is giving you in the holy bonds of matrimony, a trust. She is young... and inexperienced. Guide her and love her... ...keep and protect her from all harm. Wilt thou LOVE her?" At which point this wayward, murderous hulk of a man becomes a teary and dewy eyed portrait of remorse who collapses into the lap of his suffering wife like Jesus in a pieta consoled by the Virgin Mary. Because what clearly matters is the husband's suffering, not the wife's.</span><br /><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And if that's not enough to make the Carmens of this world cringe, there's then the moment in the beauty parlor, when the wife runs away in horror from a barber with the temerity to try to take her hair out of its virginal bun - her purity thankfully intact. Then there's the set piece with another 'knowing floozy' who tries to give the husband a manicure, suggestively pulling his hand out from underneath the barber's smock, only for him to swat away her ministrations to his wife's all-consuming relief. A moment later, when an upper-class man tries to get fresh with this innocent country wife and breaks off one of the flowers bought her by her husband to put into his lapel, the husband emerges from under the barber's smock, freshly shaved, and this so recently almost murderer draws a pocket knife, only to nip the flower off as the gentleman covers his neck with his hand, clearly certain that the husband was about to give him what the OJ Simpson defense team called the Colombian Necktie. </span><br /><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And yet, amid all this psychotic violence is the simple story of a married couple falling back in love with one another by experiencing a new facet of life - an innocent rural couple, firmly fastened to the prison of country life's slowness that's caused so much desperation and longing in modern literature, arriving in the bustle and activity of the city to find the life and action for which they ache, and arrive at that perverse balance between the innocence of children and the tragic knowledge of adulthood's sacrifices that is romance - that bond we all seek, the eternal spring of life's being, the fleeting moments we wish are forever, when life as must happen disappears and all that remains is life as we wish it to be. And yet in order for life to occur as we wish it to be, life must be disappointing enough to form our wishes. </span><br /><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And after bits with a drunk pig, impossible to explain, accidentally breaking the head off a statue during some horseplay, making out in what the emotion seems to transform a crowded thoroughfare into the Garden of Eden, and then drunkenly making out as flying angels form ring around them, shortly before which the husband wants to beat up yet another upper-class twit for suggesting that the couple do a country dance for a large city crowd - which they do to the city dweller's eruptive delight. </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">They sail home by moonlight, 'a second honeymoon' the wife calls it with all the literalness of a pure country girl, her errant husband, who nearly drowned her on the same boat that morning, as in love as he probably was on their first honeymoon. She falls into blissful sleep upon his chest, and he gently places the lapel of his jacket over her face, in twelve hours, turning into good husband again who protects his wife. </span><br /><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">But in these days before doppler radar, a frenzied storm erupts as suddenly as the moonlight seemed eternal but </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">a moment ago</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">. Even the city dwellers duck for cover. The calmness of the lake upon which they live turns into a roaring sea, as the pure and terrified country wife holds onto her husband for dear life, preventing him from doing the rowing necessary to save them.</span><br /><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">The desperate husband wakes the whole town up and forms a search party on the lake. She survives by holding onto a bundle of bamboo picked and placed into the boat by his mistress - but not before he tries to kill his mistress yet again, this time, nearly succeeding, and we're half-rooting for him to be successful! But a figure who is probably the wife's mother tells him that she's been found and is alive. He comes back to her bedside and sits by it for the rest of the night, the entire town relieved and overjoyed that one of their own is not lost. The movie ends with the wife awakening, her long hair all the way down, bedecked in a white nightgown and white sheets, her roughly four-year-old son sleeping by her side, she awakens at the rising of the sun to her husband by her bedside, and they share a kiss that dissolves into rays of sunlight and the burst of the sun. Is it not the most beautiful image in all of cinema?</span><br /><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">18 hours after this husband almost became a wife-murderer and a few minutes after he almost becomes a mistress murderer, his wife awakens, and they live on, if not happily ever after, then redeemed with a second chance at life - the seemingly redeemed husband seemingly proven utterly deserving of happiness and forgiveness, never mind that had he remained a good husband, the life of his wife would never have been in danger, let alone twice, let alone that the first of the two times, he was the direct cause of the danger, never mind that he was almost became a murderer yet again just a moment before his reunion with his wife. </span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Sunrise is exactly as melodramatic a movie as it sounds like, with those utterly unbelievable silent movie gestures and a dramaturgy that wouldn't be believable in a Christmas pageant. And yet it should matter not a whit. Its melodrama is just a symptom of the metaphysical drama taking place onscreen. The metaphorical stakes are nothing less than a human soul, the husband's soul. What yetzer will the soul embrace? Will evil be rewarded and virtue punished? Is a redeemed soul that once strayed deserving of any reward? &nbsp;As melodramatic as Sunrise is, these are not questions easy to answer, and as any Hollywood movie must, Sunrise tries to answer them definitively, and yet it cannot. How many days before the husband erupts again in a violent rage? How many days before he tires of the farm and eye wanders again to another city girl who's probably named Rachel. </span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Sunrise speaks to us from another world where cynicism has yet to be invented. Men are men, strapping, quick to anger, quick to lust, quick to violence, yet able to be soothed by the purity of love, for which it is a woman's holy duty - a duty she can either assume, thereby becoming like an intercessing goddess, or reject, thereby becoming a whore. It is very easy to be cynical about such movies, and yet one's critical faculties feel an overwhelming urge to melt in the presence of such sincerity. Just as in the music of Bach or the painting of Rafael; Murnau arrived on world history at a very specific moment when his chosen artform was on an indivertible course to conquer the world with its power. 1927 was the final full year of film's Silent Era, and the very moment when visual storytelling blossomed in a manner never seen before and perhaps never since. In this final twilight of Silent Film, everything about the visual components of movies become as fluid and poetic as ballet - sets, lighting, costumes, exposures, even overacting: Sunrise, Metropolis, Faust, Flesh and the Devil, Mare Nostrum, The Son of the Sheik, Sparrows, The Temptress, What Price Glory?, The Winning of Barbara Worth, It, The Italian Straw Hat, London After Midnight, The General, Pandora's Box, The Crowd, The Wind, Underworld, The Unknown, Steamboat Bill Jr., An Andalusian Dog, Lonesome, The Passion of Joan of Arc, Queen Kelly, Sadie Thompson, Show People, Diary of a Lost Girl, The Lodger, Man With a Movie Camera, The Last Command, The Docks of New York, The Circus, 7th Heaven. Just as it was forty-five years later, there was something magic in the cellophane - but the magic dissipated far more quickly. The Golden Age our parents may currently reminisce upon took sixteen years between Bonnie and Clyde on one side and The Right Stuff on the other. The Golden Age which their grandparents remembered began around 1926 and was all over by 1929, but for those threeish years, all a director seemingly had to do was be competent at his job, and he'd create something eternal. </span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">There were flashier directors after Murnau who had much more trenchant insights into human nature</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">, but insight into humans would dilute everything which makes Murnau so special. Just as with Bach, I doubt there is a single artist in his medium who can make you believe again in everything about life about which you've abandoned all hope. If you're close to suicide, watch Sunrise. You may have thought yourself a cynic, but all bad feeling melts in the presence of its beauty - it is the beauty of dawn, of hope, of the idea that not a single person in the entire world is beyond redemption or undeserving of it. It tells the sinner within us all that no matter how badly we oppress others, we are not beyond mercy. It is the kind of hope that those of us privileged enough to feel will use as resolve to take our instinct toward sin and use it for virtue while having to question no longer what is virtuous: to move mountains, to overthrow governments, to build societies, to make a girl who was nearly a movie star into the love of your life.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And all this is precisely everything that Carmen least wanted to hear or see at this moment. Carmen was probably much too close to her agonies to experience anything like a trigger for reliving them, but the idea that a man who is so clearly evil can achieve redemption so quickly was everything that contradicted the last eighteen months of her life. When a man has murder in his heart, there is no redemption for him, and even if there is perhaps an infinitesimal possibility of redemption, it's certainly not something the man discovers over the course of a single fucking day. </span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Steve did not see her rolling her eyes and grinding her teeth and tensing up her hands in the darkness of his room. He often looked over at her to gauge her reaction, but never caught her at any particularly expressive moment. As we men do 95% of the time, he saw what we wished to see in this particular woman, and if men much more experienced and confident around women than young Steve have no idea what women are thinking, then how was Steve to know? And therefore it came as quite a shock to him when Carmen let out an enormous guffaw toward the end when this prodigally murderous husband kneels in a state of grace at the bedside of his utterly saintly, unblemishable, wife.</span></div><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The second after Carmen let out her roaring cackle, she apologized profusely, as anyone in a new relationship would after guffawing at a potential significant other's favorite movie. When Steve immediately turned the movie off and light on, she went somewhat limp, as though the dread coursing through her heart dissociating herself from the room before she had to experience the inevitable melodrama that would ensue. But, to her astonishment, Steve was extremely interested in knowing what she thought.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">But for one of the first times in her life, the inkwell of her verbal acuity had dried, and she was at a loss to explain precisely what she found so offensive about the movie.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Why did she weep when she saw his books? Because for the last few weeks, she'd found herself unable to recall what she'd read. Books were, to her, something to access with instant neurological availability. One glance at a piece of paper, and it was committed by heart for life. Whole tractates of the King James Bible, whole acts by Shakespeare, whole chapters of the Quixote and whole stories by Kafka she could recite in the original Castillian Spanish and Prague German with the exact pronunciation of its location and period, whole piano concertos by Mozart - both the solo piano part and the orchestral score, whole albums of Edith Piaf and whole operas by Verdi which she was able to sing and play on the piano as though it were second nature, not only able to sing any jazz standard or song by Dylan or The Beach Boys or trash song by Herman's Hermits or Tiny Tim, but able to improvise half-hour piano solos around them with countermelodies and modulations and thematic interpolations of a dozen other songs by the same artist and a dozen more by the artists they influenced and the artists who influenced them. Any one of which she could summon to mind and memory as though by animal instinct, as naturally as the rest of us take a breath or eat a meal after a day's fasting; any one of which were available to call to mind for an audition.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Her parents had no idea where she came from. They were rural immigrants like any rural immigrants, perhaps a bit better at what they did than most, and perhaps assimilated a bit more easily into American life than some did. Music was not something they made themselves, but at they were aware of music and loved it, and surely all four their own parents were musical - folk musicians to whom a career in music, or any career at all, was an utterly alien concept. When they weren't fishing or farming or selling their goods, they played the quena and the bandolina and banduryia and the bukhot; national instruments of the Philippines and Colombia, where their days were spent as farmers and fishermen, and nights around campfires and oil lamps with Tinkling and Muisca dancing - a life that could just as easily take place in either 1600 AD or BC as in 1940. You got up in the morning, you served your particular God, you did your best to avoid other spirits, and you went to sleep until one unsuspecting night when sleep claimed you. &nbsp;Legendary family stories developed around particular members of the family, but you didn't know if these family members died a few years before you were born, or a few hundred years; maybe even a few thousand. Perhaps variations on these particular stories were common to every family, every town, every region of the world, and perhaps all these folk tunes are just as similar from place to place. But because these stories and this music have no historical record, they seem infinitely more authentic - coming to us from that ether generated by the long darkness of pre-history, when the world was only explicable through magic. Life itself was magic, any day when a person was shielded from death was its own miracle that required a supernatural explanation. Every respite from death was a beautiful gift, every object of order that endowed life with ever so slightly more convenience was wrested from the chaos of nature, and therefore an object of indescribable beauty that could not be conceived had it not already existed. For a moment in these people's lives of whom we have no record, these artful objects did not imitate nature as so much humdrum art does, but rewrites nature's very laws, and therefore every folk tune was beautiful and perfect, every folk tale was beautiful and perfect, every pot and plate was beautiful and perfect, every meal was beautiful and perfect, all of them gifts handed down from above and below by forces well beyond their understanding, because they were all wrested from a nature that would never guarantee a life with the presence of any of them, and the presence of any of these gifts from the spiritual realm was a gift to be savored until the spiritual realm claimed them back. A pot, a plate, an instrument, could so easily break. A musician or a storyteller could die. The fish could disappear from the water, the crops not grow, the animals disappear from the forest. And where there was light, darkness would descend upon the face of the deep.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Miracles were not supposed to happen in America, and yet, here was the miracle that was Carmen Chavez - with all the advances in technique, here was a person who overcame technique and played with it as a baby does with a rattle. Perhaps she's a second Mozart, perhaps she's even a Shakespeare of performance - someone for whom a career as arm candy in a Burt Reynolds movie would be utterly wasted. She should be playing and singing Poulenc and Schubert at Carnegie Hall, she should be playing and singing Cleopatra and Sally Bowles on the West End.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Her parents, both of them, stopped going to church when they came to this country, but when Carmen sang lullabyes back to her mother when she was six months old, when she was speaking entire sentences at nine months in Spanish, English, and Tagalog, reading in all three languages by a little after her second birthday, and reading adult books by four years old. It was shortly after her fourth birthday that her parents had confirmation that something extraordinary was happening to their daughter - perhaps a literal confirmation. They flew back for a cousin's confirmation in Bagota when she was four, and during the celebration in the downstairs church rec room, somebody had broken into the organ loft and made the whole church resound with the note perfect melody of Alma Redemptoris Mater. After the melody was complete, it was played a second time with harmonies, and the harmonies were completely different than the usual organist, perhaps simpler but they worked just as well, perhaps better. But this was no teenage amateur breaking in - both the door and the organ were simply unlocked, and little Carmen, four years old but barely looking three, sitting down on a bench upon which her legs were barely long enough to reach the end of, let alone reach the pedals, and played on a keyboard all by herself. The organist was eating bandeja paisa and drinking aguardiente just as everybody else was, so he stormed up to the organ loft with his ever-ready switch, expecting to find some teenager with a year of piano lessons who broke in and possibly damaged the door. But the moment he saw this girl barely larger than an infant play Alma Redemptoris Mater, he dared not make his presence known until she was done. When she was, he picked her up, he kissed her on the forehead and told her she was a miracle from Heaven. He carried her downstairs to tell her parents, they wept as they knelt down in front of a statue of the Virgin. It was a miracle such as those of which their own parents always spoke. For twenty years, they never missed a Sunday, and every spare dollar not devoted to good works was devoted to music lessons for an extraordinary child who came from nowhere. </span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The only way she could have known about these keys was on those few times her father took her to see Uncle Ray (who couldn't see her of course), and Uncle Ray would play some songs on the piano for her while Carmen's father fixed some wiring in the lights (why Ray Charles needed lights nobody knew...) and Carmen watched the keys which Uncle Ray could not see as he played. As Carmen progressed, Uncle Ray was all too happy to give an occasional lesson in jazz whenever he was in town, and after the lesson was over, Carmen would be sent to play with a friend down the street with a couple dollars for candy while Uncle Ray gave Carmen's mother a lesson too. </span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">When Carmen's Ina told Uncle Ray heard about what happened, he sat her at the piano, and instead of playing Alma Redemptoris Mater, she harmonized a note perfect and slightly out of tempo What Would I Do Without You and sang the whole song, a few words were mispronounced as a four-year-old would without thinking of what she can't understand: "I get all closer to me," instead of "Aw, get all closer to me." Even a brilliant four-year-old plays like a brilliant four-year-old, but a four year old like this could astonish the world.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This narrator has little to no interest in the details of how she appeared on Ed Sullivan and Dick Clark's American Bandstand when she was seven. He has only a little interest in the details of the private piano teacher from Hungary, Mr. Nordau (Doctor Nordau), contracted directly from Universal Studios by Uncle Ray, who paid every cent of those lessons for twelve years, the methods and personal manner of Dr. Nordau turned her into an obedient girl savant until her fingertips bled. He would balance a coin upon her hands to teach her finger positioning, and when the coin fell off he would strike the hand with a ruler. By nine she'd already graduated from Beethoven Sonatas to Liszt Transcendental Etudes, so the red letter day was not when she mastered a new piece, it was when she graduated from a dime on her hand to a penny, from a penny to a nickel, from a nickel to a quarter. He also has little to no interest in the details of in the details of the other upper-middle-class immigrant teachers from Germany and Austria and Poland and Romania and Czechoslovakia and Italy and the Ukraine who taught her in the high school for science she insisted upon going to rather than a school for the performing arts, or who coached her in the various extracurriculars for which her abilities and work ethic could only be described, once again, as prodigious: drawing, dancing, German, French, Italian, English, creative writing, calculus, chemistry, biology, physics, philosophy, theology, history, current events... Still greater than her ability to assimilate information was how each teacher took it upon themselves, as though they were the only one to do so, to try to mentor Carmen and steer her in the direction of their field, as though netting such a prize achiever into their field would be the achievement that justified decades of surrendering some prestigious post-Hochshule career to put up with every worthless and verzogenes Gor und wildes Tier in the security of Southern California.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">How did she imbibe so much information so quickly? Well, if one can reduce such ability to a practical application rather than divinely-mandated ability, her technique was to simply sing her facts. From the moment at five years old that she realized "Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally" could be sung to the famous tune from Eine Kleine Nachtmusik if you put an extra 'please' on that ending D, she realized that she could find the right piece of music to assimilate any degree of information she wished. But as I'm sure you've guessed by now, what unfortunately matters in Carmen's story is not the ascent, but the descent.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So you'll unfortunately have to permit me to fast forward to five years later, sometime around 1984, when it came time to name their first daughter. Steve and Carmen already had two 'failed' pregnancies to their confution before Cleo came into the world, miscarried because of what the doctor so tactfully referred to as an 'incompetent uterus.' Due to a division in the uterine septum, the children could not derive nourishment from their mother. They therefore passed all too quickly into lavatorial oblivion. I don't remember whether it was the second or the third time that Carmen sprained her pelvis during which Steve asked an OBGYN to take a look and see if the uterine canal could be repaired during the same time that the orthopedist tried to mend the pelvic damage.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Surely enough, six months after the surgery, Carmen had a green light to get pregnant again, and nine months later, they commemorated that joyous day by naming their first daughter Clarissa, in part after Virginia Woolf's most famous creation, but in part to commemorate the day when they first got together and Steve helped Carmen to understand what became their favorite book: Mrs. Dalloway, but mostly because Steve's mother insisted that the daughter be named after her own recently departed mother, Clara, who came to Los Angeles from Berlin in 1936 with a four-year-old daughter hidden in a large suitcase with some holes punched out for air while a husband and two pubescent boys were stranded in Germany.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It was all pretty hard until 1992. Carmen's capacity as a pianist became more and more reduced. By 1987, she could not play for more than an hour at a time without straining a muscle in her hand. By 1992, the strain became a sprain. By 1998, it was a half-hour before she'd break a finger. By 2001, it was the length of a Chopin Waltz played at pianissimo, and then she had to close the piano for the rest of the day. By 2004, she'd forgotten that she couldn't play; she would sight read whatever music was on the piano stand, and would negotiate around the two or three digits she'd already broken in the days and weeks preceding with a howling scream cutting off whatever once beloved Schumann character piece or Schubert Impromptu or Debussy Prelude caught her attention from the piano stand (their younger daughter made sure to put different music on the piano every day so there wouldn't be the same piece resounding around the house forever).</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Through it all, Carmen still had her gorgeous voice, which thirty-five years of cigarettes could not wreck, even if it moved her voice down a half-dozen fachs. Unfortunately, she realized that any kind of performance, any at all, might put her straight into the public's black eye because of her time with The Producer. Who knows to what she could yet again subject herself, or to what she could subject her family? To remind people that another paramour of this producer still stalked the streets of LA like a ghost could reopen all manner of old trauma, put the life of everyone she cared about at risk from people The Producer might pay to silence her before she talks, and might make a scandal of her life and her childrens' to the press. She and Steve both agreed that she had to stay away from the stage until The Producer was dead, not even so much as a dinner theater. The Producer was still around Hollywood, one of the many ghosts of Hollywood infamy, a low-level, stipended producer allowed to walk around the studio lots, absorbing the sun like a vegetable as he 'supervised' B-movie releases, which the New New Hollywood let him refer to as his 'comeback.' The comeback necessitated many tabloid magazine and TV stories which would plaster his many sins and conquests and legends ten years after his trivial comeback seemed like any comeback at all. Once every two months there was another scoop chasing journalist calling Carmen, not talk about her story, but about the story of the woman Carmen was left for - Tamera Wittenberg. No comment of course.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Nobody could figure out of Tamera Wittenberg was European Royalty or white trash from Kansas, but she was tall, twig-like, leggy and blond in precisely that way which the charitable call statuesque and the uncharitable call a bimbo, but the 80's called perfect beauty. It's true, she didn't seem like a great brain, but she was as quiet as a mouse and submissive as a dog with its belly up. She was never anything but polite to Carmen.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Carmen however, had nowhere else to go, and was, in fact, living in a room down the hall from the Producer for the first five months that Tammy and The Producer were involved. Carmen had no job, and even after The Producer took up with Tammy, she was understandably worried that The Producer would go ballistic if she showed any initiative outside his house, so for five months, she simply stayed in the house, she read, she went to school, she went back to her room, where the maid would leave a meal for her at her doorstep.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This continued for five months, she would speak to The Producer when spoken to, and occasionally he would visit with her in her room - where discourse was at least a bit more civil than it used to be, and congress a bit more gentle. But one day, Carmen heard the same shouts and shattering of glass and turning over furniture and whimpering tears that she knew so well from time past emanating from the bedroom that once was hers. It was eight-thirty in the morning; she immediately walked out the room without a single possession. She walked from The Producer's Beverly Hills house to which she belonged for eighteen months to the USC campus to meet with Steve three hours later, and life resumed as well as it could.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Carmen wanted to teach voice, but unfortunately, there is never enough market for a voice teacher and far too much market for piano teachers. One would think that parents would go mad with the desire to teach their children most basic musical skill in the world, but singing is so basic that there is no mark of respectability to it. The piano, rather, is the ultimate mark of respectability. If one can carry a tune, one can sing. But to play a piano well is no less an achievement than building your own house or creating beautiful woodwork and clay pots. In Europe, America, or Asia, child who plays piano well is the ultimate mark of a family that wrested order from the existential chaos of living in a lower social class.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Back in the 80's, there was a full roster of piano students whom she taught while Steve watched the kids, but Carmen knew that there were many better piano teachers in the area, so she kept her prices much lower and hoped that volume would cover the expenses which her billing would certainly not. As so many music teachers are, she was in no way cut for a job of managing children; managing their anxious mothers who want to believe their child another Horowitz, managing their bored fathers - more interested in picking her up than his children. Even among her few intermediate-level students, she knew she could never impart any valuable musical ideas to indifferent children whose parents assured them that they would understand why they needed to play piano when they were older. She was becoming like so many of her teachers who wanted better for her, and she did not understand why this new generation of students were so much less obedient than she once was. Her frustration with her charges was continually palpable to them, and most of the kids who'd been with her longest would dread their lessons in a way that ensured any inclination toward practicing killed in its inception. A few times a year, another student would break down in tears mid-lesson, and a call would follow a few days later from the mother: "Jessica has too much on her plate."</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">All through this life-era, Steve lost as much money as he made. Even with health insurance, the surgeries Carmen needed ever more direly were a fortune each to each - and the more surgeries she needed, the higher her premiums went, until she was just plain uninsurable and their family policy was cancelled. Steve and the children had to each get an individual plan, but Carmen was on her own, corrective surgery after orthopedic surgery after cardiothoracic surgery, and eventually even neurological surgery.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Furthermore, matter how long since she left The Producer for him, Steve feared that Carmen was accustomed to a luxury he couldn't possibly provide, and couldn't possibly admit he couldn't provide. If she hadn't bought a new dress or jewel in a month, Steve would buy her one (to the very end, Carmen was immaculately dressed). But not even Carmen's needs and wants, or the thought of a baby Steve thought Carmen couldn't possibly carry to term, were enough to keep Steve an accountant. When Steve told his mother he was about to go into business with a friend to operate a video store, her screams woke baby Clarissa up.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Steve's father was more supportive and said to give it, and their son, a chance to do what he wants, but his mother was right. Even in 1980's Los Angeles, there wasn't enough demand for a local independent to carve out a share of the market from Blockbuster Video. Had they closed in 1986, Steve would still have possession over the money from his accounting days to pay off their loan. But Steve and his friend kept borrowing to keep it going until early '88, by which time the bank came to repo everything in his house while his four year old daughter absorbed her first vivid memories and his wife tried to calm their screaming six-month-old second daughter: Elizabeth. The furniture, the silverware, the fridge, the beds, the piano, the violin, the books - all 900 of them, the 3700 VHS tapes, even the film cannisters and the projector equipment from college. We were lucky they didn't take the house. For the next five years, Carmen had to teach piano from a four-and-a-half octave Yamaha keyboard which her stepfather bought for her.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Steve did the only thing a real man can do in that situation, he went to his parents for a loan. His mother gave him a big hug, and of course she told him that of course they would, but he knew the condition.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So Steve went back to managing managing books and accounts at the very same bank that repossessed everything he owned. At least they knew him... But when he applied for a job interview, the very last place where thought he'd get an interview, the place he applied to as a private joke, was the first to call him back. Nobody seemed to remember that they took his entire life away from him just a month ago. Perhaps they did, but they were too polite to mention it, or perhaps they were trying to make it up to him; or perhaps he was too generic to remember, or perhaps he was just another anonymously bad investment vehicle among thousands. Nobody checks your credit score when you're applying to be the man who checks the credit score. All they knew was that he had shining recommendations from the last bank at which he worked, high academic honors from the Marshall School of Business, and a mother who threatened to take her account elsewhere.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Steve stuck with his mother's agreement in good faith for three years. Again and again, he offered to repay the loan, but his parents wouldn't hear of it. Every day was miserable, this was the price he paid for doing nothing but watch movies and change diapers for three years, but Steve had a life again. He was making $35,000 a year, but after taxes it was all pocketable money thanks to his parents (his mother's) loan and their agreement to pay for any further surgeries Carmen needs. His beautiful wife learned to spend on a budget surprisingly well, his daughters were brilliant and the older one already showed some flashes of her mother's former brilliance.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In 1991, Steve returned to his mother with a check for the entirety of the loan. He didn't pay for the surgeries &nbsp;"I'm going into business again and I've quit my job."</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">"Please tell me..."</span></div><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">"No it's not in video."</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It wasn't even movie related. Of course his mother refused to accept the check, and she was actually slightly enthused when she heard his plan, though not as enthused as she might have been. It's LA, people need protection from crime, and he was going to become his friend's junior partner and manage the distribution of car alarms.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It wasn't a bad idea. His parents had been burgled twice in the last five years. Sure, Fairfax was not the neighborhood it once was, but you never used to expect anything like that kind of crime can happen to you. Why can't Steve go into home alarm?</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The date Steve stood up to his mother was March 2nd, 1991. The next day, Rodney King would get the pulp beaten from him at the corner of Foothill Boulevard and Osborne Street. Business was slow for fourteen months thereafter. Steve was drawing a salary, but while home alarm was something every white person thought he needed, too few people seemed to think they need a car alarm.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">But on April 29th, 1992, Reginald Denny and Fidel Lopez were pulled from their cars and beaten on camera as a racial maelstrom deluged its way through the City of Angels, and car alarms become something everyone thought they needed, not because their cars might be stolen, but because a car alarm can surely be what saves you when a pack of marauders attack you while still in a car you can lock, and all you have to defend yourself is a vehicle made of steel that can go up to 200 miles-per-hour.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">By June, Steve, who'd never made a salary higher than $40,000, was pulling in $50,000 a month, and would continue to do so for the duration of the 90's - roughly $90,000 a month in the currency of a quarter-century later.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It was also in 1992 that Steve's father passed away quite suddenly; an apparent heart attack while behind the wheel of his SUV, but Steve's mother didn't want an autopsy to confirm it. No sooner than her husband passed did Steve's mother want to be all the more in the lives of her only child and granddaughters. But no longer had Steve to rely on his mother for loans, no longer had Steve to rely on his mother for advice, no longer had Steve to rely on his mother for support. In the 80's, when Steve and Carmen went out on the weekends, they would drop the kids off with Steve's parents, and his mother would keep a close eye on the kids, but in the 90's, they could hire a stunningly cheap Spanish-speaking nanny. In the 80's, when Carmen needed surgery and neither Steve nor either of her parents or step-parents could pay for it, Steve's mother would sign checks with no questions, except for many private words with her son about how disappointed she was that he married such a high-maintenance woman. But in the 90's, Steve made more money in a year than his parents made in ten. In the 80s, Steve's mother would call four days a week, full of advice and opinions, and her son would listen to them all patiently and with seeming cheer. In the 90's, Steve was sometimes too busy to even take his Mom's call once a week.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Steve's mother - whom we'll call Denarius, not because that was her name but because that was the only thing anybody ever called her which she liked - didn't exactly hold her tongue about her opinions of her son's ingratitude, but she at least held it by her own standards. Even if she complained constantly to relatives whom she knew Steve never had any time for, she never complained about Steve's newfound independence to Steve himself. Perhaps Steve was right to be uninterested in his extended family, they never really forgave Denarius for marrying outside the faith, but her relatives all lived in San Francisco and Los Angeles, but how many semites were there in Pismo Beach?</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Steve's grandmother Clara, his Oma, wanted a future for a daughter with no father, no brothers, no money, no English. These supercilious ersatz Yekke relatives were born in Frankfurt and came to America as children more than fifty years ago. They made millions in schmatteh factories in which worked lots of Jews who had the bad foresight to came over only later when there were more of us, when business was already tougher, and when Jewish immigrants didn't have much money to bring with them.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Aside from the suits and dresses they wore on all occasions, no matter how warm the weather, these relatives might as well have been from another planet - Russia even... Jewel-encrusted rings on half their fingers, necklaces for every day of the week, cars for both the husband and the wife which chauffeurs usually drove, a dinner fit for Shabbos every night. And yet, it was the Great Depression, so apparently they had very little money they could lend a supposedly cherished relative with a kleines Madchen. Sympathy, sympathy, sympathie for their plight, a job in the factory, but not even enough additional money to pay the rent, and not a cent offered to her try to bribe Clara's family out of Berlin.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Los Angeles was a big city, but Clara knew she wasn't wanted there. If her only remaining relatives wanted to keep her side of the family as small as possible, then she knew she had to go elsewhere to give her daughter a new family.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">She meant to go up to San Francisco, but as so often happens in these immigrant stories, the only Auto she could afford to buy broke down in a smaller city, Pismo Beach. Rather than get a new car, she renovated a derelict motel and turned it into a nice bed and breakfast with a restaurant on the downstairs floor. Pismo Beach is the Clam Capital of the World, or so they say, so Clara's signature dishes were clams fried in schmaltz and clams stewed in the Yemenite Zhug which Clara's aunt taught her to make. There was kugel and matzoh ball soup on the menu, a brisket sandwich, potato pancakes, a beef stew on Saturdays, home-cured pastrami, and corned beef around September, homebaked babka, chopped liver, blintzes around June, stuffed cabbage, beef sausages, a potato and spinach pastry which the migrant workers thought were empanadas, chocolate chip biscotti, honey cake in the fall, pickled herring, home fried doughnuts in the winter, a carrot yam stew with raisins and apricots around Thanksgiving. The Matzoh Ball soup was so popular that a number of people suggested that Clara should put some shellfish in it and turn it into a Boulliabaise, but Clara's personality was so forbidding that nobody would dare make the suggestion. Nevertheless, "Clara's" was a hit, and if it had nothing to do with the winningness of Clara's personality, it certainly had something to do with her daughter's.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Clara never married again, and her daughter never saw so much as a man in her mother's life. But Denarius was the petite and exotic and funny waitress who served with a smile after school and before homework, who always took the orders right and remembered the name of every second-time customer. She was not beautiful in the way all the other swell girls in Pismo Beach were; she was a half-foot shorter, she had skin with a perpetual tan and a bumpy nose, she wouldn't wait for the fella to pull out the chair or hold the door, and never waited for the guy to tell her what she thought before telling him first. But the swell fellas in Pismo were crazy for her. Every one of them was a faithful customer after school, and every one of them probably asked her on a date multiple times, but she'd never say yes to any of them, and because she never said yes to any of them, they'd come back to Clara's twice as often to try to change her mind.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">One guy never asked her out, so he, of course, became the one Denarius asked out. In 1955, he became Clara's son-in-law. Frederick Johansen, six-foot-four, All-American football lineman, decorated Korean War veteran, electrical engineer, man of five-hundred words a day, and former Lutheran acolyte. Certainly not good enough for her daughter, but good enough for America.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Los Angeles relations refused to come to the wedding, refused to send a gift, and refused to speak to Clara for more than fifteen years. Until '55, Clara would come down every year to Los Angeles for the High Holidays and the Seders; she went to every Bar Mitzvah, every wedding, every bris. Occasionally Denarius would accompany her, but usually not. Denarius barely had half a dozen conversations with any of them as a child. Who the hell knows if these relatives ever went to shul if there wasn't a high holiday or a simcha involved? But even if they didn't, to marry a shegetz among cultural Jews is tantamount to declaring allegiance to Hitler; it is and will always be an excomunnicable offense that breaks families apart forever because it's the argument leads down the rabbit hole of theology's most important and unresolvable question: Is faith motivated by love, or is love motivated by faith?</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In our modern era when tolerance has finally won a few battles over faith, the question of intermarriage becomes still more vital. When the world shows signs of growing more tolerant, what need is there to uphold the groups and struggles of old? Every intermarriage, be it Jew to Gentile, Black to White, Liberal to Conservative, Lamb to Lion, is a rejection of old polarities - a declaration that all the great struggles which your ancestors underwent were absolutely unnecessary, irrelevant to the present, and deserve to be sucked into a black hole of forgetfulness. Memory can be as much a curse as a blessing, and surely many memories deserve to be forgotten. But in the modern era, when we so often seem on the precipice of a finer new world in which differences can finally be reconciled, perhaps all that stops us from realizing a world that's at least closer to this finer new world is the fearful memory of the world as it once was and threatens to be again. However, because we cannot erase these memories, perhaps these memories are precisely what dooms us to never achieve a world of greater tolerance.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It was within a month of the wedding that Clara unexpectedly took up Fred's parents invitation to visit their church. In her nearly twenty years in Pismo Beach, the local legend Claradonna Zweig was never seen to socialize with anyone, and Fred's parents only invited her out of politeness. Yet by the end of 1955, she was a regular attendee to St. John’s Lutheran Church in Pismo Beach who insisted upon catering the Sunday lunches free of charge. On Good Friday 1956, she took baptism and never missed a Sunday thereafter for her remaining twenty-eight years.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Clara’s was closed every Sunday thereafter, and after Church, Claradonna Helena Zweig would return home with a friend from her congregation, Sieglinde Schafer, a widow from Breslau whose husband, a promising Captain in Germany’s Eighth Army, was felled by a hail of bullets but two months after they were married in June 1914. Hauptmann Schulz was one of the 12,000 fallen Germans at the Battle of Tannenberg, whose legendary acts of bravery enabled the slaughter of 170,000 Russians. Sieglinde was roughly ten years older than Clara. She’d found her way to Pismo Beach with her father in roughly 1920, after the German riots against the Polish, who would eventually transform Breslau into Wroclaw, burned down her extremely German father’s medical offices. Who knows how they ended up in Pismo Beach, but Dr. Schafer died in his sleep in 1938, an eloquent and celebrated member of the Central Californian Bund whose funeral at St. John’s Lutheran was attended by hundreds of German-Americans and Klansmen alike. He was eminent throughout the state, perhaps even the Western United States, for his many kind words and trenchant insights about the great strength of new German regime. Every Bund organization from Montana to New Mexico would engage him to speak as an expert on German politics. &nbsp;&nbsp;</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And so every Sunday in the nineteen-sixties and seventies, Clara and Sieglinde would go after church to Clara’s modest apartment over the restaurant. They’d sing all the songs of gymnasium days, they’d play four-hand duets on Clara’s out of tune upright, they’d recite all the Goethe and Heine forced upon their memories by rote, they’d talk disapprovingly of the other church members, and they’d recall friends and husbands long dead. </span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Clara’s daughter found Sieglinde Schafer a bit icky, and was certain Ms. Schafer was antisemite, but she was happy that her mother finally made a friend when all she’d ever seen from her mother was work and sacrifice and testiness. She had an older friend of her own not unlike Sieglinde, who could remind her of whom she truly was. </span><br /><br /><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Clara’s daughter, whom I suppose fancied herself all American, found Sieglinde Schafer rather icky, and was certain Ms. Schafer was antisemite like her father, but she was happy that her mother finally made a friend when all she’d ever seen from her mother was work and sacrifice and testiness. Even so, her mother's turn toward a new religion proved too much for her. </span><br /><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">St. John's installed a new Pastor right before Christmas 1965. A smiling blond from Montana who sported a flattop haircut and bolo ties every Sunday. On Good Friday '66, the tenth anniversary of Clara's baptism, he shocked the congregation by mounting the pulpit with a guitar in his hand. Younger members were overjoyed, they stood up and clapped excitedly while putting their arms in the air as though second nature. Clara and Sieglinde, on the other hand, were incensed and immediately petitioned the board for his firing. But no one on the board objected, they loved Pastor Lehmann, so that was the last which either Clara or Sieglinde made about the issue. For the next twenty years, they simply sat in the back pew and scowled. </span><br /><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Much less objectionable to Steve's grandmother was Pastor Lehmann's fundraisers for Reagan and Nixon, his preemptive encouragement of student deacons to volunteer for the Vietnam War, his public shaming of a lax daughter who asked a question about the War's justice. Clara had never been a political sort, instructing her daughter from the earliest age that political questions are what tear people apart from each other and can only interfere with people trying to go about their lives. But Clara's daughter began to notice the inveighs that Clara now seemed to be parroting from her Church about ungrateful students who protested against this great country of ours, and the ungrateful negroes who dare compare the way good Christians in the South treat their black people to the way godless Communists treat their billions of unfree citizens. The day that Fred offhandedly compared the segregationists to Nazis was the day he ended up with a bowl of Matzoh Ball soup dumped on his head. </span><br /><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">That last point about the ungratefulness of negroes was the one that Clara's daughter found truly inconceivable. How could Clara call negroes ungrateful when she owed so much her triumph in America to a negro woman? Neither Clara nor her daughter were the sole progenitors of 'Clara's success. The third, and perhaps most consequential, in their trinity of unexpected prosperity was Mrs. Washington, the kindly lady from Clayton County in Georgia whose husband drove her to work every day from Grover Beach </span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">at four in the morning in their beat up Plymouth Valiant before he went back home to get their four children ready for school and then drive fifty miles east to his job as a farmhand and then return at ten to pick Mrs. Washington up. The kindly lady who </span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">went every Sunday to sing in the church choir at Bethel Baptist, and catered their after-service lunches every week with 'Clara's leftover provisions from the week's food supply. When Clara herself became a Christian, she immediately informed Mrs. Washington that she no longer had access to the leftovers to cater her church because Clara would now use them to cater lunches at her own church. </span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Mrs. Washington was the kind of woman who would always sneak Clara's daughter a cookie, sometimes two or three, whenever Clara was too busy manning the stove or the cash register to look up. Running a business takes all kinds of people, and you need a boss who can kill with kindness as much as you need a boss who delights in killing. </span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Mrs. Washington was, begrudgingly, one of Clara's first hires. Clara thought that colored help, even if they worked in the kitchen, would drive customers away, but she needed the help immediately. Nobody knew who Clara was, and Clara had no idea how to get more applicants attention. The men were in the theaters of war, and their wives were almost fully employed in the factories. If Clara's was going to be a success, they needed all the help they could get. But Mrs. Washington had been waiting tables since she was an eight-year-old kid in Georgia. Clara had no idea how to take inventory, how to fill staffing needs, how to </span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">quickly </span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">update menus, and how to advertise. It was certainly not Clara who came up with the phone book advertisement in 1945: "Clara's: Home Cooking from the Jewish Mom You Never Knew You Needed," Every time a waitress broke down in tears from the stress of dealing with a customer, or from dealing with Clara, Mrs. Washington was always there with a hug and tissue. Every time a health department inspector or a supplier needed to be supplicated, it was Mrs. Washington, not Clara, who'd handle the negotiation. Every time a customer was in the hospital, Mrs. Washington would visit with a dinner tray taken without Clara's knowledge and some good cheer. Clara was an institution in Pismo Beach, but Mrs. Washington was the reason every customer over the age of 30 came back. </span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">And yet for almost twenty-five years, she never took her meal anywhere but in the kitchen. </span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">In 1966, an increasingly infirm Clara accidentally spilled a </span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">boiling</span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"> pot of Matzoh Ball soup on Mrs. Washington while she was mopping the kitchen floor. The skin on Mrs. Washington's limbs was forever disfigured thereafter, and she never properly walked again. Clara claimed to her daughter that it was the wet floor from the mop that made her slip, but her daughter always suspected that Clara, in her sixties and showing every year of it on her once waif-like and now witch-like frame, was already nowhere near as strong or coordinated as she once was.</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Perhaps Clara used the accident to explain an infirmity caused by the simple accumulation of years and cares. Clara was untouched by the scald of the soup, but she claimed that her arms and knees were bruised from the fall and was never the same thereafter. She also claimed to have a nagging pain in her right shoulder where the pot fell on her. She claimed that she sympathized with Mrs. Washington for how badly she was hurt by the fall, but perhaps she used her own pain to absolve herself of guilt.</span><br /><br /><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Clara told Mr. Washington that his wife deserved whatever Clara could possibly give her, but that Clara couldn't give her much. Secretly, Clara always thought she'd paid Mrs. Washington far too much, and occasionally suspected Mrs. Washington of occasionally skimming from the cash register. She carefully explained to Mr. Washington that she couldn't possibly pay them anything more than something minimal when Mrs. Washington could no longer work? The hale and healthy Mr. Washington, perfectly slender, grey at the temples and the mustache, with eyes that bore into interlocutors with all too much understanding, nodded </span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">silently and sagely as he stood in front of Clara's paltry explanation; not so much as a word in response after the hello,</span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"> and when she was finished, he walked out of the restaurant without saying so much as a goodbye. Clara promised the Washingtons a dollar twenty five a week for the rest of Mrs. Washington's life - a minimum wage for an employee who maximized Clara's life. She sent it in the mail every week until she died, but never got any confirmation that the Washingtons received it. </span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Denarius Zweig had never ridden a horse before meeting Annie-Jane Ivers, she’d never shot a gun, never played a hand of poker, never lit a fire, never slept under the open sky, never smoked a cigar or a joint, never skinned a deer. The boys all wondered where Clara’s daughter went when she wasn’t waiting tables, the answer was to let Annie-Jane Ivers show her the dank and steam and slit of the natural world. </span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Annie-Jane Ivers ran away from her father’s house in 1919, when she was only eleven - her mother perpetually bruised, her independence perpetually violated, her sister perpetually defeated. One month later, she became a permanent worker at Monsieur Marchand’s French Boarding House named Coquette. By fifteen, "Coquette" was the Madame. By seventeen, she was turned into to the street for asking that her older peers get better pay and treatment. Mr. Marchand explained that it was not because she asked once, but that she heard his explanation, yet insisted upon asking twice. </span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Over the next twenty years, Annie-Jane worked as a bandit, a banker, a blacksmith, a butcher, a bounty hunter, a cardshark, a cowherd, a deputy, a gold miner, a gunslinger, a homesteader, a marshal, a medicine showman, a missionary, a preacher, a railroad laborer, a rancher, a rustler, a schoolmarm, a shopkeeper, a snake oil salesman. No coquette she. You work overtime to survive, or survival works you over. </span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">1948, forty years old, five-feet ten, her hair a bluish silver, her shoulders broad and hands as calloused as any laborer in America, her face wizened by crow’s feet and laugh lines and four packs a day, her skin prunishly bronzed like a person who hadn’t been indoors in a quarter of a century, her eyes with the mischievously rapid movements of a woman hard to impress and easy to amuse, she walks into Clara’s and after ten minutes, Denarius gets her to order the cheese blintzes. Annie-Jane likes them so much that she comes back for the cheese blintzes eight nights in a row. Denarius tries to get her to order something else: the babka, the bialy, the borscht, the brisket, the bulbitchki, but no, she wants more cheese blintzes. </span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">With Annie-Jane’s barmaid humor and her scullery maid’s crudity, Clara’s daughter had never known it was possible to laugh like that. Clara did not approve of Annie-Jane’s loud ostentation, and warned her daughter not to get too friendly with this woman, but she couldn’t exactly tell a customer not to come who stayed for five hours at a time and ordered fifty dollars worth of blintzes every day. </span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In 1949, Annie-Jane acquires a hundred acre horsefarm. She invites both of the Zweigs to come out and see it. Clara, of course, says no for both her and her daughter. Her daughter, of course, calls Annie-Jane up and says that she’s going to come out there without her mother’s knowledge. The next day, she asks Fred Johansen out on a date next Saturday, on Sunday, she tells Clara that the date went so well that they’re going to have a second date that day. Clara doesn’t approve of her daughter moving so fast, but better to be with Fred Johansen than with that freienfrau. </span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The next day, Clara’s daughter rides a horse, shoots a deer, smokes a cigar, plays poker. Fred Johansen pecked her on the cheek yesterday, but when it’s time to say goodbye until the plans they made next week, Annie-Jane Ivers bends her backwards over her knee and gives Clara’s daughter a realization she can never unrealize. </span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Saturdays with Fred and Steve, Sundays with Annie-Jane. That’s how it was most weekends for eighteen years. When Denarius needed an excuse to start spending nights under the stars of Ivers Farms, she tells Fred they’re getting married. Seven weeks later, they declare their love before God under His watchful nave at St. John’s Lutheran. Within five years, the&nbsp;Saturday mornings and afternoons are entirely Steve’s, the Saturday nights and Sundays are entirely Annie Jane’s. Fred simply goes into the garage with his short-wave radio and tunes up his Chevy. </span><br /><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The farmhands give enormous respect to Denarius, never making so much as a pass or flirt, and give her the nickname 'Denarius' because she always rode a black horse. She didn't understand the nickname, but she loved it all the same. Nearly two decades of blissful Sundays, sleeping next to Annie-Jane in fields of open California pampus, awoken by American goldfinches and Savannah sparrows, vigilantly ready for the dawn to welcome another Sunday of riding and hunting with a sunstroked and windswept face which, for eighteen years, Fred never asked once how she acquired. </span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Sometime around Memorial Day 1967, Denarius returns to Clara's for work on Monday, not windswept but ashen. The only person with little enough tact to ask her what's wrong is Steve, who gets the first of many an earful from his mother. </span></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Steve never got the full story of what happened to Auntie-Jane except what he read thirty years later on microfilm - which was that the legendary Annie-Jane Ivers was found on a small minority of Pine Flat Lake's shoreline that wasn't on her property. Her wrists had been bruised from shackles and her legs chained to a weight that the coroner said had clearly fallen off. He also indicated the presence of multiple barbituates in her system that he speculated were ingested by dissolving in strong alcohol. </span></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">One find and simple day in the early summer when he was eating some Matzoh Ball soup, a drunken hand from the horse farm showed up and started screaming some variation that only imprinted itself within his seven-year-old brain as 'YOU DID IT! IT WAS YOU!' while waving a gun at screaming customers while Clara sobbed unreservedly. Denarius emerges thirty seconds later from the back with a rifle, loaded and cocked, and tells the farmhand they'll talk outside. The conversation from the window was animated, but the guy never showed his face around Steve's Mom again. </span></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">What happened was probably as simple as Annie-Jane growing sick after twenty years of Denarius living her weekday life as a devoted daughter to a repressed Jesus freak and devoted wife to a beach bum drip, and who knows what a person as hard-scrabble as Annie-Jane Ivers would have done to complete an objective denied for twenty years? As Steve read the microfilm, he began to remember Auntie Jane showing up at inopportune moments like when the family was at a Howard Johnson's, which would prompt an animated discussion twenty feet from the table, or showing up unannounced at their Pismo house, sometimes appearing from some distance in the window. Steve remembered thinking it was very strange when her mother ordered Auntie Jane out of the diner, "I just want to eat here. Remember when that was normal?" she'd say. Until then, Steve had never seen Auntie-Jane in the diner himself, but he thought it as odd as Auntie Jane that she was being ordered out. </span></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">It was at a fourth of July party with the Johanssen clan that Clara’s daughter decided to do something which surprised the hell out of everybody, particularly Fred. Steve was seven years old, and she decided he needed to go to Hebrew school. “But why?” Fred asked, not in frustration but in bewilderment. “Why does anybody need a Hebrew education in Pismo Beach?”</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“That’s the problem. We have to leave Pismo.” </span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And just like that, they moved. Fred Johansen was the type that always got along. His entire family was in Pismo more than a hundred years earlier. Dozens of births and deaths and baptisms and confirmations, decades of toil and sacrifice and simmering family resentments that were worked through by the thousands upon thousands of little bonds of love that keep a family together through their worst periods to the moments that all families cherish - the holiday dinners, the birthday parties, the lazy afternoons on the beach, the relaxed Sunday barbecues, the drunken nights out that occasionally ended in throwing a punch or two, but always made up for the next day, the grass they smoked in the back yard. Yet it never occurred to Fred, or to any other Johansen, that such bonds had to work to be maintained, or could strain under the pressure of longer distance. </span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Whether or not those bonds strained, Fred kept his feelings to himself as he always did, and but for perhaps an extra whiskey before bed or a doobie after everybody was asleep, he was the same quiet picture of smiling amiability in middle age that he was when his wife forcefed him matzoh ball soup for the first time. If he disliked it, he kept it to himself, and sipped on matzoh ball soup at least once a week for the rest of his life. </span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So in 1967, Steve found a new job as an electrical engineer in LA, and the Johansens moved to the big city. Steve went to public school in Fairfax, and his mother, in truly theatrical Hollywood fashion, got a Bas Mitzvah at the closest Reform Temple, Beth Hoveh, and while she only knew a couple college acquaintances in LA, she made sure to turn the Bas Mitzvah into an event. She sent laminated invitations to every member of the Beth Hoveh and to all her estranged relatives. Worried that these relatives might disapprove of a woman being called to the Torah, she kept calling their houses, talking their ears off for forty-five minutes at a time with whatever subject she could think up, and boaring her way into renewed ties and friendship with them until she was sure they’d relent and RSVP ‘Yes.’ The reception was not held at the synagogue, but at Nate n’Al’s Deli in Beverly Hills, near where her relatives lived. </span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Fred wasn’t the type who thought much about money. He didn’t spend much, and there wasn’t much he wanted to spend. As far as luxuries went, he had a small boat he built himself, a couple rifles for hunting and a fishing pole, a wet bar in his basement, the 1952 Chevy 3100 pickup that he drove and repaired himself for forty years, and the zither his grandfather, Olaf Erikssen, taught him to play. Any luxury more grandiose than their slightly larger than average 3 bedroom house would not have occurred to him to buy. </span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">But from the moment they were married in 1955, Fred’s wife made sure that every cent not devoted to home or car maintenance was tied up in Treasury Bonds and stocks: GE, GM, Coke, Chrysler, the Seven Sister oil companies, Conoco Energy, Boeing, Campbell Soup, Kellogg, IBM, Whirlpool, Proctor and Gamble, Detroit Steel, Studebaker, Collins Radio, National Sugar Refining, Zenith Electronics… Some of these investments went bad, but of course, most of them paid off quite spectacularly. All you had to do was buy the stock, not touch it for forty years, and you’d have enough money to feed a hundred generations of hearty Johansen folk who wouldn’t have to ever work again.If Fred ever realized that he was a multi-millionaire, he never gave much indication. Steve didn’t realize it either until his mother died and her will left him 18 million dollars in liquid assets. </span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">From the moment Steve turned seven in 1967, his mother watched his grades like a hawk; gave him extra math problems over meals, schlepped him across town for violin lessons, and bought him books with no subtle pressure that he should read, signed him up for every extra-curricular, occupied his empty moments with chores around the house. </span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Every Saturday from the move until Steve was thirteen, the two of them would go every Saturday to whatever movies were playing at the Chinese Theater. Different movies played there every week, usually in double features, from cartoons to subtitled foreign films. No matter how adult or violent, no matter how risque, no matter how intellectually challenging or B-movie dumb, the ritual was inviolate. Steve and his Mom would sit through it together. It was their ‘thing’, a way that Steve’s Mom could show that she trusted him, and perhaps an unspoken apology for driving him so hard. </span></div><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Steve eventually had to become a teenager like all teenagers, and became too old to regularly get caught with his Mom every Saturday. Sometimes they’d go, but Steve would usually try to get out of it. By the Saturday of Steve's Bar Mitzvah, their movies became just another chore his mother pressured him to complete. </span><br /><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Pressure was Denarius's adult life: yelling at Steve and Fred, complaining about them to cousins whom she knew tolerated her rather than liked her, loafing around a house with the soaps on the television while her husband was at work and come home to meals that were a pale shadow of what her mother could offer when they visited her in Pismo, let alone Fred's mother. The weekend smoking habit of Ivers Farms became a two-pack a day habit in Los Angeles, and Steve would complain endlessly about how the house would wreak and show his mother every newspaper article he found about how cigarettes can kill. His mother would simply shrug, and on this issue would ask for the privacy she never gave Steve, and Steve knew better than to ever point out the hypocrisy. </span><br /><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">When Steve got a girlfriend in Junior High, she banned the girl from their house and staked out near the girl's house in case Steve went over there. They had to meet in secret, but Lisa tired of the sneaking around and eventually went with the running back of Jr. High football team, Mike Johnson. When high school came around and Steve was a lanky six-foot nerd with aviator glasses and a too large nose, and in any event kept too busy by extra-ciricculars for romance, his mother would question him pointedly about why he didn't have a girlfriend and what he could do to make himself more attractive to women. </span><br /><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The first true explosion between Steve and Denarius had to wait until Steve was eighteen, when Steve's Mom insisted that he not major in the film school and get a practical major that could prepare him for work. "You knew that I wanted to go to the film school and you let me apply there so I would stay close to home. Now you tell me I can't go. You just want to keep running my life!" he said in a rare moment of drama and assertion against his mother that ended with the punctuation of a slammed door to his room, a Hollywood-like gesture</span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"> seen before or since in the Johanssen household</span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">. This all-too-rare moment of assertion from Steve was perceptive, more perceptive than Denarius would have guessed, but long experience taught him his mother's motives all too well. Of course this was her motive, and she didn't see what was wrong with it. Parents are there to guide their children. She didn't want Steve to turn out a wild animal like Annie-Jane, and what was the point of having children of she couldn't do better for him than she or Steve's family ever had. Children may disagree with the means, but they'll thank you in the end, and they'll know that you did what you did for their own good. For the week before college, Steve locked himself in his room and never came out. He snuck out through his window for dinner at McDonalds, and of course Denarius noticed, but against her better judgement, she took Fred's rare piece of advise to let him go. </span><br /><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Denarius was not impressed with Carmen. She was as impressed as anyone else with the stunning beauty that now hung around the Johanssen household, but Steve kept telling his mother how brilliant his fiance was, yet Denarius never saw the brilliance for herself. Carmen was quiet, she dressed a little trashy, she was helpful when it came to serving and doing the dishes, and Denarius was grateful for that. When she heard Carmen play the piano, she was vaguely impressed, but she attributed the wrong notes to a lack of practice and work ethic that was in fact due to neurological trauma. </span></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Steve did not dare tell his mother the truth of Carmen's condition until they were married and she was pregnant with Clarissa - knowing that his mother would accuse him of throwing away his future for a woman with such a serious condition, and no doubt would inveigh that Carmen brought these conditions upon herself due to her innate sluttishness. </span></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">But Steve's mother was in fact more understanding of it than he thought she would be. Burying her head in her hands and offering immediately to pay for any surgeries - the kind of debt which Steve would do anything to avoid. She explained, quite matter of factly, that had she known she would have advised him against the marriage in no uncertain terms and instantly knew that that was why Steve waited to tell her, but Carmen is now one of us and we take care of each other. </span></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">For years thereafter, Steve waited for his mother's explosion on Carmen which never came. His mother exploded plenty, </span></span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">but instead of using his marriage to Carmen as an example of his irresponsibility, Denarius would inevitably take Carmen's side - or at least what she thought to be Carmen's side:</span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"> when Steve embarked on his video store venture, "You have an unwell wife to take care of and you're going off to run a business that everybody knows will be a flop???" When Steve had a second daughter, she exploded again, not even because of his recent eviction but because "You're going to subject an orthopedically challenged wife to another pregnancy???"</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Denarius would note with alarm Carmen's every new slurring of speech, every slightly hesitant step, every sentence not finished, and would offer to come help around the house however often they needed. Steve and Carmen never took up Denarius's offer, but during the eighties she would show up unannounced for two evenings every week during which she'd insist on helping to straighten the house and cook dinner, and happily watched the grandchildren during those Saturday nights when Steve and Carmen went out with friends. During the eighties, she would occasionally try to get Steve and Carmen to come with the kids on Friday nights for Shabbos dinner, but they would inevitably leave after an hour-and-a-half, explaining to Steve's Mom that they had to get the kids to bed and the kids inevitably wake up in the car if they fall asleep first at her house. </span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Even when Steve's mother was at her most furious with him for his video store venture, she would call him most weekdays and talked to him for forty-five minutes. Steve would roll his eyes to his partner or the rare customer he had to handle, but he would always take the call and answered any questions she posed within the paragraphs of verbiage and shul gossip with an undertone of indulgent irony. </span></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Fred, whose pot belly grew exponentially after the move to LA, died of a heart attack in the winter of '93, a few months from retirement and the beginning of the whirlwind vacations Denarius was planning. About a month after he died were the LA riots, during which she braved the whirlwind of violence and traffic to come directly and </span></span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">unannounced to</span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"> Steve's house with a rifle and twenty pounds of dried goods to make sure that everybody was safe and well-fed. </span></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">It was shortly after the riots that Denarius noted a difference in how she was being received by Steve. The realization that she might be shut out of her son's life dawned upon her in gradual steps: pride her son was finally working hard, bemusement the work never let up, suspicion she was being avoided, alarm she was being shut out, devastation at the loss of her son. </span></span><br /><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">It wasn't a total shutout. How could Steve completely shut his mother out of his life? But four calls a week became one call a week. Forty-five minutes became a half-hour, zealously guarded; or so Steve's mother believed. After five weeks, Steve's mother began to time him to see how long it would take before he would say he had to go. The goodbye would take five minutes as she inevitably recounted to him all the things she wanted him to do that week. On week six, the stopwatch said 29:35; week seven, 28:46; week eight, 27:54; week nine, 26:43, week ten, 25:37;, week eleven, 24:45. Once their talk time slipped below 25 minutes, she was positive she was being avoided. </span></span><br /><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Steve's mother resolved to redouble her commitment to her son and his family, she showed up unannounced at Steve's gate three evenings during the work week instead of her customary two. She would show up at precisely five in the afternoon with dinner and desert in tow, just as their nanny was bringing the kids home through the door from school, so that the nanny wouldn't clog her grandchildren's arteries every day with Pepian, a spicy Guatemalan stew with all its fried cornmeal and shredded pork.</span></span><br /><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">One day, after Steve and Carmen came home from babysitting, she was talking to Steve after the kids and Carmen went to bed, and said she wanted to talk to him about how often she came to the house. Steve also wanted to talk about it. Denarius wanted to come over four times a week, Steve wanted her to come over two. </span></span><br /><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Steve: The kids need to concentrate on schoolwork.</span></span><br /><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Mother: Is my help for them not good enough?</span></span><br /><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Steve: It's fine, they just think you're too strict.</span></span><br /><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Mother: They think I'm too strict? Did you ever tell them how I was with you?</span></span><br /><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Steve: Let's not use that metric.</span></span><br /><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Mother: What metric? They have to get good grades and they've inherited their father's lazy gene. </span></span><br /><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Steve: I don't want to make my kids lives more stressful than they already are.</span></span><br /><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Mother: What's stressful about them?</span></span><br /><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Steve: Cleo's miserable in school. </span></span><br /><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Mother: I'm sure she is, you're letting her gain weight hand over fist. Of course, if you didn't move out to Orange County with all these shallow people she might not have such a problem. </span></span><br /><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Steve: Mom, kids are kids, and I just want to let my kids have some fun if they can. </span></span><br /><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Mother: They can have fun and still learn some discipline. </span></span><br /><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Steve: Yeah but Cleo says you're raising your voice whenever she puts down a wrong answer. You don't have to do that, do you?</span></span><br /><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Mother: Math is important! It saved your life!</span></span><br /><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Steve: Math is important, but it's not so important that you have to make Cleo cry. </span></span><br /><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Mother: I didn't mean to make her cry. She just wasn't paying attention! She needed to stay focused!</span></span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Steve: Look Mom, you just need to be a little nicer. To her, to us. Sometimes I think you're always under a lot of stress because you're lonely, maybe it's time to start going out and meeting new people. Have you thought about dating? It's been more than two years.. </span></span><br /><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Mother: (cutting Steve off) ..I'm not lonely! I'm just taking care of my responsibilities!</span></span><br /><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Steve: Mom, sometimes I think you don't need to be so responsible.</span></span><br /><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Mother: Who's gonna be responsible if I'm not?</span></span><br /><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Steve: We can be perfectly responsible when you're not here. </span></span><br /><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Mother: And where's the evidence of that?</span></span><br /><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Steve: That's unfair Mom. </span></span><br /><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Mother: You do nothing but put your happiness first. You try to go to film school rather than get a real degree, I have to make you go into finance. You leave your accounting to operate a video store that everybody knows will go belly up, and I have to find an apartment for your family and pay for your wife's surgeries out of pocket. </span></span><br /><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Steve: Come on Mom, you were already paying for those before I got the video store.</span></span><br /><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Mother: That's supposed to make me feel better?!?</span></span><br /><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Steve: I'm sorry you feel that way Mom but nobody's stopping you from being a little more selfish. Everybody wants you to be happy. </span></span><br /><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Mother: I'm happy when I'm with you and your family! I'm happy at my Temple and what would make me really happy is if you came to temple more often with the girls! </span></span><br /><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Steve: We can talk about that another time Mom.</span></span><br /><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Mother: Always another time. You always put me off. </span></span><br /><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Steve: When have I ever put you off? I see you four times a week! We talk on the phone all the time!</span></span><br /><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Mother: You barely talk to me on the phone anymore! We used to talk four times a week for forty-five minutes. Now you can only talk once a week and you can't even talk a half-hour! I timed it!</span></span><br /><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Steve: You timed it?</span></span><br /><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Mother: I had the suspicion that you were trying to get me off the phone after a half-hour, so I've timed it for the last five weeks, and you're not letting the conversation go more than a half-hour. </span></span><br /><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Steve: Do you have any idea how absurd that sounds? </span></span><br /><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Mother: Do you have any idea how absurd it is that we talk so little anymore?</span></span><br /><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Steve: I'm hard at work, I'm making money, I have a family, it's exactly what you always wanted from me. Even if it's true, who cares? We still see each other four times a week!</span></span><br /><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Mother: So you're deliberately hanging up on me after a half-hour?</span></span><br /><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Steve: I have to work! What's the big deal?</span></span><br /><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Mother: I don't have anybody else! I've got my friends from Temple and a few cousins. Who else am I supposed to talk to?</span></span><br /><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Steve: I thought you said you weren't lonely. </span></span><br /><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Mother: I'm not lonely if I'm doing things for people I care about!</span></span><br /><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Steve: Are you saying that the things you do for us are really for you?</span></span><br /><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Mother: How can you say that?!</span></span><br /><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Steve: I'm just saying that's what it sounds like you're saying.</span></span><br /><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Mother: The things I do for you are for you! Family is my biggest priority!</span></span><br /><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Steve: It's mine too!</span></span><br /><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Mother: Is it really? You spend less time with your children than I do! </span></span><br /><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Steve: I'm at work till late, things have to get done! Carmen is with them, and whatever she can't do anymore the nanny does. </span></span><br /><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Mother: The nanny does... That's a nice thing a person does whose priority is family, pawning them off on a stranger because your wife can't properly look after her children. </span></span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Steve: That's really not fair Mom. Emely is great with the kids! </span><br /><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Mother: A mother be the one looking after her kids, and if she can't because you chose to marry somebody with a mental handicap, the grandma should look after them! </span><br /><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Steve: Mom that's a terrible thing to say about Carmen and I'd really like you to apologize. </span><br /><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Mother: All I said was the truth. Carmen is mentally handicapped and you chose to marry her anyway. And now we all have to sacrifice to make up for what she can't do.</span><br /><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Steve: Mom, Carmen was the woman of my dreams. She IS the woman of my dreams. She's my reason for living! What was I supposed to do? Not marry her?</span><br /><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Mother: Yes! That's exactly what you're supposed to not do! Do you honestly think your Dad was the person I dreamed about? You honestly think I wanted to spend forty years talking cars and zithers? But your father was a good man, a sweet man who did everything he was ever asked to do! I married him because I knew he would give his kids the best possible life, and he did. And what did you do with the life he gave you? You use the best possible life to marry a pretty girl who's mentally retarded!"</span><br /><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Steve, as ever, never really challenged his mother. He simply indulged her until she was out the door, and then resolved that he would never see her again. </span></span></div>Evan Tuckerhttps://plus.google.com/101333496816879280258noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5120202207964289878.post-48431897415546980232016-11-14T01:32:00.002-05:002016-11-14T01:34:43.343-05:00A Brief Depressing Post About Trump<div class="_1dwg _1w_m" style="padding: 12px 12px 0px;"><div class="_5pbx userContent" data-ft="{&quot;tn&quot;:&quot;K&quot;}" id="js_5" style="line-height: 1.38; overflow: hidden;"><div style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; margin-bottom: 6px;">Particularly Depressing Trump post ahead. Stop now if you don't want to read. I'm scared to post this and may take it down soon.</div><div style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; display: inline; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; margin-top: 6px;"></div><div class="_1dwg _1w_m" style="padding: 12px 12px 0px;"><div class="_5pbx userContent" data-ft="{&quot;tn&quot;:&quot;K&quot;}" id="js_12" style="line-height: 1.38; overflow: hidden;"><div style="display: inline; margin-top: 6px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Considering that my Dad was right about Trump winning, maybe I should consider what he thinks about Trump's presidency. He says it will be a disaster, but arithmetically worse than Bush's, not geometrically. That's still horrifying, it's a disaster, it's not a cataclysm or an apocalypse. My best guess so far is that it's a cataclysm if not the end of us all. What most scares the bejesus out of me is that I believe we are now living in Vladmir Putin's gameroom. I believe is Trump is literally a Manchurian Candidate coached and aided by Russian intelligence, chosen to do everything possible to erode democracy, perhaps not as ironically as it seems, by turning America and to a lesser (perhaps much lesser) extent Britain into Russia - maybe France too. I don't believe that Trump will issue the same amounts of homophobia as in Russia - it will obviously be Mexicans and Muslims, and every other minority will as a result be 'on notice' that it could happen to them too. Nevertheless, I still doubt that more than a handful will ever be deported&nbsp;<span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129;">(if you say you want to deport 3 million illegal aliens, you give yourself the right to harass every foreigner and person of color in the country to determine who is illegal)</span>, and it will still be terrifying to be of either extraction in this period. So with a couple different 'cosmetic' details, I believe we will now see all the same tactics as in Russia - journalists who turn up the wrong information will be found in Rock Creek Park the next morning (seriously journalists, BE CAREFUL), Democratic lawmakers who are too persuasive could have the same happen, famous critics of Trump will be put in jail for "Trumped Up" charges, particularly famous opponents like the Obamas and Clintons may have to leave the country, judges will get some very nice bribes or be blackmailed, police will torture half their prisoners and detainees with impunity so as to make the price of protesting so high that hardly anyone will do it, Trump will have no problem dropping 100,000 casualties work of explosives on people already suffering under ISIS, organized crime will resurge in business, Trump and cronies and lobbyists will use the government as a personal financial troth and another trillion dollars will simply go missing, federal funding for education and energy will be cut to its absolute nub - all of which will be exacerbated heavily by an economy that will careen out of control because the dollar will soon no longer be a reliable standard currency. Hopefully, this will all be over in four years, but who knows? If Putin is actually calling the shots, will he give it up willingly in 2020? What extent is he willing to go to maintain control? I hope Dad is right, but this is what Putin's Russia is, and while Trump has much more to do to erode America's liberal civil institutions, he will do everything he can to make it happen - that's that many more figures he can pick off. He might be worse than this, he might (let's pray) be better, but the best we can hope for is a disaster. Brace yourselves.</span></div></div><div class="_3x-2"><div data-ft="{&quot;tn&quot;:&quot;H&quot;}"></div></div><div></div></div><div><form action="https://www.facebook.com/ajax/ufi/modify.php" class="commentable_item" data-ft="{&quot;tn&quot;:&quot;]&quot;}" id="u_0_17" method="post" rel="async" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><div class="_sa_ _5vsi _ca7 _192z" style="color: #90949c; margin-top: 12px; padding-bottom: 4px; position: relative;"><div class="_37uu"><div data-reactroot=""><div class="_3399 _a7s clearfix" style="border-top: 1px solid rgb(229, 229, 229); clear: both; margin: 0px 12px; padding-top: 4px; zoom: 1;"><div class="_524d"></div></div></div></div></div></form></div></div></div>Evan Tuckerhttps://plus.google.com/101333496816879280258noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5120202207964289878.post-69330082986464599512016-11-12T15:27:00.000-05:002016-11-12T15:41:54.917-05:00An American Playlist: A Beginning At LeastSamuel&nbsp;<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fRL447oDId4">Barber: Agnus Dei</a><br /><br />Samuel&nbsp;<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vC8f1VknVqk">Barber: Adagio for Strings (world premiere recording)</a><br /><br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKrxPTePXEQ">Samuel Barber: Adagio for Strings (Original String Quartet Version)&nbsp;</a><br /><br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPIYytgMvbw">Samuel Barber: Full Piece which Adagio for Strings is Taken From</a><br /><br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJjXadvkohk">Samuel Barber: Knoxville: Summer of 1915</a><br /><br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8haCn5IvFg">Samuel Barber: Symphony no. 2</a><br /><br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MdRD6gEa9CY">Samuel Barber: Violin Concerto</a><br /><br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=poi4ycSzfsk">Samuel Barber: Symphony no. 1</a><br /><br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dr-4WDjPQNw">Samuel Barber: School for Scandal Overture</a><br /><br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xza5zmMlTqs">Samuel Barber: Cello Concerto&nbsp;</a><br /><br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FYw1wcGKV28">Samuel Barber: Second Essay for Orchestra</a><br /><br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dt7P8xm9pAg">Samuel Barber: Medea's&nbsp;</a><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dt7P8xm9pAg">Meditation and Dance of Vengeance</a><br /><br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iq2aE-tpZWc">Samuel Barber: Medea Ballet Suite</a><br /><br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dr-4WDjPQNw">Samuel Barber: Music for a Scene from Shelley</a><br /><br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJhICNN3uSk">Samuel Barber: Reincarnations</a><br /><br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HobIr7logJc">Samuel Barber: Piano Concerto</a><br /><br /><br /><br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbfMlk1PwGU">Fats Domino: Ain't That A Shame</a><br /><br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQQCPrwKzdo">Fats Domino: Blueberry Hill</a><br /><br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qz94yveXgQ">Fats Domino: Blue Monday</a><br /><br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H1z45jVlM34">Fats Domino: I'm Walking to New Orleans</a><br /><br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNkjyHLYoTw">Fats Domino: I Want To Walk You Home</a><br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mypHZmXdU3o"><br /></a><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mypHZmXdU3o">Fats Domino: Kansas City</a><br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqs5gkyH930"><br /></a><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqs5gkyH930">Fats Domino: I'm Walkin'</a><br /><br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2eZZBMt1CQ">Fats Domino: I'm Ready</a><br /><br /><br /><br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gbBkXHRM1o">Irving Berlin: Alexander's Ragtime Band</a><br /><br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vmc-pEyUHTs">Irving Berlin: God Bless America</a><br /><br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=71smG5d29to">Irving Berlin: Oh How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning</a><br /><br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66km3m_UE_k">Irving Berlin: Puttin' On the Ritz</a><br /><br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=64rulm3CFhg">Irving Berlin: Blue Skies</a><br /><br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B5wQDxumlDc">Irving Berlin: Cheek to Cheek</a><br /><br class="Apple-interchange-newline" /><span style="color: #0000ee; text-decoration: underline;">Irving Berlin: Let's Face the Music and Dance</span><br /><br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iHIwo6bl0-s">Irving Berlin: You're Laughing at Me</a><br /><br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrAWd5fMeCs">Irving Berlin: Let Yourself Go</a><br /><br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZWnyQ-801M">Irving Berlin: You Can Have Him</a><br /><br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S072YgXIvsQ">Irving Berlin: Russian Lullaby</a><br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kjL1IzM2oGQ"><br /></a><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kjL1IzM2oGQ">Irving Berlin: Get Thee Behind Me Satan</a><br /><br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZOJoV6H2UM">Irving Berlin: Top Hat, White Tie, and Tails</a><br /><br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fmOGD7DNa24">Irving Berlin: It's a Lovely Day</a><br /><br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0tzchp-AzM">Irving Berlin: How About Me</a><br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zh5ZrDxS99U"><br /></a><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zh5ZrDxS99U">Irving Berlin: I Used to be Color Blind</a><br /><br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KoFRNnmUvHk">Irving Berlin: Lazy</a><br /><br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WICzHNSiG6o">Irving Berlin: How Deep is the Ocean</a><br /><br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WD_pbtSXNkU">Irving Berlin: All By Myself</a><br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7BD96L4nKs"><br /></a><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7BD96L4nKs">Irving Berlin: Remember</a><br /><br /><br /><br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TfeBAo-08c0">Frank Sinatra: All or Nothing At All</a><br /><br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9ZGKALMMuc">Frank Sinatra: The Way You Look Tonight</a><br /><br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmQq6yLe2ww">Frank Sinatra: Come Fly With Me</a><br /><br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6E2hYDIFDIU">Frank Sinatra: Luck Be A Lady</a><br /><br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6E2hYDIFDIU">Frank Sinatra: My Way</a><br /><br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhZ2X9znPxM">Frank Sinatra: Fly Me to the Moon</a><br /><br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIiUqfxFttM">Frank Sinatra: That's Life</a><br /><br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i-ZUXQuFcnw">Frank Sinatra: New York, New York</a><br /><br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C1AHec7sfZ8">Frank Sinatra: I've Got You Under My Skin</a><br /><br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IvPWyv4Jd_8">Frank Sinatra: I Love You Bab</a>y<br /><br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlSbSKNk9f0">Frank Sinatra: Strangers in the Night</a><br /><br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ug8cBIbxDaY">Frank Sinatra: Summer Wind</a><br /><br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iF5bA1Arsco">Frank Sinatra: I Can't Stop Loving You</a><br /><br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZNIKZdoehE">Frank Sinatra: You Make Me Feel So Young</a><br /><br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VHJ3iZpfBRI">Frank Sinatra: When I Was Seventeen</a><br /><br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PoSbnAFvqfA">Frank Sinatra: Something Stupid</a><br /><br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LIZIBm2QGaM">Frank Sinatra: Witchcraft</a><br /><br /><br /><br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bF3NusWv-OA">Aaron Copland: Appalachian Spring</a><br /><br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tr8Nj8Z5aBQ">Aaron Copland: Appalachian Spring (original 13-instrument version)</a><br /><br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_HwbjtXXPY">Aaron Copland: Rodeo</a><br /><br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FLMVB0B1_Ts">Aaron Copland: Fanfare for the Common Man</a><br /><br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=csX9skn0q2Q&amp;list=PLUSRfoOcUe4bcJVxnkrT-1MFn-lmJYV3z&amp;index=2">Aaron Copland: Symphony no. 3</a><br /><br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_MxTZlYL14">Aaron Copland: Quiet City</a><br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q9zhfDSY0WA"><br class="Apple-interchange-newline" />Aaron Copland: Old American Songs</a><br /><br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PmMFL1zZ-tU">Aaron Copland: Clarinet Concerto</a><br /><div><br /></div><div><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahWeXfTsjuA">Aaron Copland: A Lincoln Portrait</a></div><div><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qj-98yBfEI0"><br /></a></div><div><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qj-98yBfEI0">Aaron Copland: El Salon Mexico</a></div><br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLM_YTnmLto">Aaron Copland: The Promise of Living</a><br /><br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=arHVZp7tdIo">Aaron Copland: Our Town</a><br /><br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vC3qQpyp4rI">Aaron Copland: Piano Concerto</a><br /><br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6AhdFW6QWEM">Aaron Copland: An Outdoor Overture</a><br /><br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=StjRTrR9A0g">Aaron Copland: Symphony for Organ and Orchestra</a><br /><br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypj28q64YY8">Aaron Copland: Nonet for Strings</a><br /><br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBh1X7yLuJ8&amp;list=PL4s5wS1PQ0Xmy-I31fdmFGj-WczKK1FqT">Aaron Copland: Red Pony Suite</a><br /><br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QX21jfXDww4">Aaron Copland: In the Beginning</a><br /><br /><br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d22CiKMPpaY">Casablanca: As Time Goes By</a><br /><br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xsqvX771X04">Casablanca: Who's Got Trouble</a><br /><br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTsg9i6lvqU">Casablanca: La Marseilles</a><br /><br /><br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=80NoPLp-Zl0">Gene Autry: Back in the Saddle Again</a><br /><br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJJGikSD9ho">Gene Autry: Home on the Range</a><br /><br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRV6JszMXoo">Gene Autry: Ghost Riders in the Sky</a><br /><br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ara3-hDH6I">Gene Autry: Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer</a><br /><br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eK0K8993jBk">Gene Autry: South of the Border</a><br /><br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKCb-U-FhmU">Gene Autry: Deep in the Heart of Texas</a><br /><br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31uGvYBj0j4">Gene Autry: Red River Valley</a><br /><br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=og0IitifuOA">Gene Autry: A Yodeling Hobo</a><br /><br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQXSkfoAu0I">Gene Autry: That Silver-Haired Daddy of Mine</a><br /><br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQWRRnhWga8">Gene Autry: My Heart Cries for You</a> (with Jo Stafford)<br /><br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yokguDBjFjw">Gene Autry: Have I Told You Lately That I Love You</a><br /><br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XSrjHIBF29E">Gene Autry: If You Want To Be A Cowboy</a><br /><br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8LRVLBBojyc">Gene Autry: The Yellow Rose of Texas</a><br /><br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QxaaN06Cd-E">Gene Autry: Don't Fence Me In</a><br /><br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRiafcZ920M">Gene Autry: I'm an Old Cowhand</a><br /><br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sm5QIDt8dnM">Gene Autry: I've Got No Use for Women</a><br /><br /><br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7qQ6_RV4VQ">Bob Dylan: The Times They Are a-Changin'</a><br /><br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YwSZvHqf9qM">Bob Dylan: Tangled Up in Blue</a><br /><br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4F0ytNzHDj8">Bob Dylan: Like a Rolling Stone</a><br /><br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-Y3KfJs6T0">Bob Dylan: Don't Think Twice, It's Alright</a><br /><br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OeP4FFr88SQ">Bob Dylan: Mr. Tambourine Man</a><br /><br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJpB_AEZf6U">Bob Dylan: Knockin' On Heaven's Door</a><br /><br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ArvrLu07xcY">Bob Dylan: Desolation Row</a><br /><br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9EKqQWPjyo">Bob Dylan: Things Have Changed</a><br /><br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=at2TiJpFT68">Bob Dylan: Hurricane</a><br /><br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Mb3CoWwNyY">Bob Dylan: Subterranean Homesick Blues</a><br /><br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Frj2CLGldC4">Bob Dylan: Forever Young</a><br /><br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6xEpIgFAPGQ">Bob Dylan: It's All Over Now, Baby Blue</a><br /><br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4rKEXFSw54M">Bob Dylan: Shelter from the Storm</a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />Evan Tuckerhttps://plus.google.com/101333496816879280258noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5120202207964289878.post-7868809144774484802016-11-08T01:56:00.002-05:002016-11-08T11:57:53.923-05:00When We Wake Up<div style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin-bottom: 6px;"><br class="Apple-interchange-newline" />I've bloviated far too much over the last two years about what is at stake when we awaken tomorrow, on fucking facebook no less. I don't need to tell you, in yet another way, that this is the world's most important election in 80 years. After tomorrow, the most powerful country in the world will either remain a democracy, however flawed, for another era, and in all likelihood, it will; or we will fall into autocracy for many, many years hence.</div><div style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin-bottom: 6px; margin-top: 6px;">But it's not over tomorrow. Tru<span class="text_exposed_show" style="display: inline;">mp will find any reason at all not to concede, and even if he does concede, he will claim that he was coerced and manipulated into it within a few weeks. To all who worked us to the point that he can be beaten tomorrow, even if only temporarily, the world thanks you, but we're all far from done.</span></div><div class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; display: inline; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;"><div style="margin-bottom: 6px;">Whether in 1933 or 2016, there is an enemy and we call the enemy by its name. The enemy is not the Republican Party, it's not even fascism or authoritarianism at its base, however much they resemble the enemy and however much they are symptoms of the problem.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 6px; margin-top: 6px;">The enemy is purity: purity of race, purity of sex, purity of money, purity of class, purity of agreement, purity of speech, purity of religion, purity of science,&nbsp;<span style="font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;">purity of technology,&nbsp;</span>purity of ideology,&nbsp;<span style="font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;">purity of party,&nbsp;</span>purity of motive. It's a cancer that metastisizes its way through Right and Left alike and can kill anything that might be helpful in them both and leave only death in its wake.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 6px; margin-top: 6px;">The way to beat it is to hold all that exclusivity up to the light - there is no one solution, no one doctrine, no one country, no one race to rule, no one class structure to overthrow. The solution is to strengthen the immune system. Everyone in America to be able to talk to each other, and not just talk, but yell, scream, insult, slander, question motives, and do it all mercilessly, while still being able to remain friends. That is how a democracy stays functional, that is how it stays healthy. Go in peace, whatever happens, I'll yell at you Wednesday again, with renewed resolve to hold nothing back. The fate of all democracy depends on the trollishness of this facebook feed.</div></div>Evan Tuckerhttps://plus.google.com/101333496816879280258noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5120202207964289878.post-9993428332207837032016-11-06T01:04:00.002-04:002016-11-06T01:04:46.044-04:00Tales From the Old New Land: Tale 4 - Just Steve (91%)<div class="_1dwg _1w_m" style="padding: 12px 12px 0px;"><div class="_5pbx userContent" data-ft="{&quot;tn&quot;:&quot;K&quot;}" id="js_4j" style="line-height: 1.38; overflow: hidden;"><form action="https://www.facebook.com/ajax/ufi/modify.php" class="commentable_item" data-ft="{&quot;tn&quot;:&quot;]&quot;}" id="u_2u_d" method="post" rel="async" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><div class="_sa_ _5vsi _ca7 _192z" style="color: #90949c; margin-top: 12px; padding-bottom: 4px; position: relative;"><div class="_37uu"><div data-reactroot=""><div class="_3399 _a7s clearfix" style="border-top: 1px solid rgb(229, 229, 229); clear: both; margin: 0px 12px; padding-top: 4px; zoom: 1;"><div dir="ltr" style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And having a playback memory, Carmen remembered something he said about copying down everything he said that sounded vaguely like a reference to Isaiah 8:1, and recorded every word of what he said for fear that he'd demand of her why she did not comply with the order he gave mid-binge/tirade to record these pearls of wisdom. In fact, she did it immediately after he let her go from the ledge. She kept a copy of it on her person every day of her life, in case the Producer ever returned and demanded to see it.</span></div><div style="font-size: 14px;"><span id="docs-internal-guid-091f4024-a147-1ba2-0aae-f70cf612e448" style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Producer and Carmen slugged on after that night for another sixteen months. When Carmen finally became Steve's, she was more radiantly beautiful than ever before for two whole decades, and considering the dangers she'd passed, one could argue that she was still more beautiful inside than out. Nevertheless, her ribs had the consistency of crushed ice, her joints bent in manners no human being should, the simple act of arising from her bed was pain itself. Among those who'd experienced repetitive trauma, it is not uncommon to deal with the constant rebreaking of bones, degenerative disc disease and an eventual lumbar spinal fusion; bone spurs, torn ligaments, degenerative arthritis, staff infections from corrective surgeries. And that's only from the effects from before he started to hit her face.</span></div><div style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This is mercifully not a book in which to discuss the particulars of tyrannical behavior which cause such internal horror. This narrator has neither the patience nor nothing like the fortitude to speak in any more than generalities about the abominations perpetrated upon Carmen and he beseeches your forgiveness for his need to speak any further of these depravities. But if this fictional rendering of a single Hollywood player getting off on the scent of blood has anything like the ring of veracity to you, then he asks you to at least consider how many thousands there may have been over the past century of powerful Hollywood men who've acted precisely like this.</span></div><div style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This particular apparition of a Producer knew on the night of this "window dressing" (his charming term for what transpired that dawn) that his days as a respected Hollywood player could be counted with two digits. Don't mind us the circumstances of his ignominy, there were any number of risible cinematic bombs in the late 70's and early 80's which wiped out Hollywood producers, production companies, and whole studios:</span></div><div style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">There was At Long Last Love, Peter Bogdanovich's trivial homage to 30's movie-musicals, Cole Porter songs, and Ernst Lubitsch romantic comedies - because nothing oozes Golden Age Hollywood class quite like Burt Reynolds, who became a superstar a few years previously when Deliverance allowed us to watch him kill a Georgia hillbilly with a crossbow while the hillbilly sodomized a 300 pound Ned Beatty as Ned's ordered to squeal like a pig. There was The Exorcist II: The Heretic, a shameless money grab of a sequel starring a miserable looking Richard Burton during a period when he looked like he was taking parts in horrible movies just so he could pay his astronomical bar tab. There was The Swarm, a horror movie about killer bees that starred Michael Caine, Henry Fonda, Richard Widmark, and Olivia de Havilland - because what everybody wanted to see in the late 70's was the biggest stars of 1945 in a horror movie with a plot too absurd for Roger Corman to film. There was I Spit On Your Grave - a film that couldn't even find distribution for two years because of its quarter-hour depictions (notice the plural) of gang rape. There was X-rated Caligula, a movie made through the combined talents of literary lion Gore Vidal and Bob Guccione - publisher of Penthouse Magazine, who simply wanted to record a literal rendering of the depraved events within the Roman Emperor Caligula's palace in Tacitus's Annals. Every imaginable degradation seemed to find its way into the script; raping a bride on her wedding day - and her groom, sex shows involving children and the deformed (if you don't believe me, watch it), gladiatorial public execution, and a confusing scene for which poor Helen Mirren has to use what is hopefully a prosthetic vaginal cavity to depict herself giving birth as part of a (literally) execrable performance within all these execrable performances. After seeing the original cut, Guccione decided that audiences weren't getting their money's worth, and insisted on inserting a forty-five minute bisexual orgy near the end which the Roman Senators and their wives are coerced into having.</span></div><div style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">There was, of course, Heaven's Gate, which lost 30 million dollars, ran to nearly four hours in original cut, deliberately killed a horse with explosives, was yanked from movie theaters after less than a week, and bankrupted United Artists - according to most experts the greatest of all movie studios - forever. Some swear it's a misunderstood masterpiece, this narrator doesn't want to find out... Of course, it has a ten minute rape scene...</span></div><div style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">There was Inchon, the B-Movie hagiography for America's Five-Star General in Asia, and for a moment in 1952 America's would-be dictator, Douglas MacArthur. Financed with no expense spared by a combination of the United States Military and world's most infamous cult leader, the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, with MacArthur played by the world's greatest actor - the ailing Lord Lawrence Olivier - for a cool million bucks, and directed by Terrance Young, who made the first few James Bond movies. MacArthur's closest confidante was played by Richard Roundtree, the original Shaft. Who'd have conceived that a movie of such disparate parts would come unglued?</span></div><div style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">There was Tarzan, the Ape Man - in which a mythical White Ape turns out to be a white man raised by apes and therefore must be brought back to civilisation in England where he can be taught proper discourse. Nevertheless, he retains the animal sexual magnetism of Africa, which overwhelms poor proper and prim Jane. Tarzan's character was found offensive by some in the 1910's when he first appeared, imagine the reception by 1981. Yet somehow, there've since been another six Tarzan movies.</span></div><div style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And who can, or should, forget George Lucas's Howard the Duck? A PG live-action movie in which a loveable alien duck gets transported through a wormhole to our world. In the course of the movie, he gets dumped by a club bouncer into a hot tub where a couple is having sex, a human that turns out to be an alien who has a tongue seems to extend like an erection in the presence of Lea Thompson, Howard's duckbill attempts to bite the ass of a sixty-something black woman whose onion-like posterior he finds quite stimulating, he excitedly opens Playduck Magazine in which we see a photo of a duck with curves and hair and feathered white nipples (later in the movie we see duck boobies with pink human nipples), the Cleveland Police Department sexually assaults Howard the Duck, and actor Jeffrey Jones (himself now a convicted sex offender) walks in on Lea Thompson seducing Howard the Duck.</span></div><div style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And, of course, Ishtar. The only of these risible and bank-busting movies directed by a woman, and the only one whose director never directed a movie again. Perhaps Ishtar was, truly, the last movie of the Old-New Hollywood - directed by Mike Nichols's old comic partner Elaine May, Dustin Hoffman and Warren Beatty starring, Vittorio Storaro (Coppola and Bertolucci's cinematographer of choice) doing the photography, co-starring New Hollywood luminaries like Tess Harper (Tender Mercies) Charles Grodin (from an Orthodox family), Jack Weston (Weinstein), Carol Kane (Woody's first wife in Annie Hall and an Oscar nominee for a part in Hester Street that she acted in Yiddish), Aharon Ipale (Israeli), Fred Melamed (Sy Ableman in A Serious Man), David Margulies (Hollywood's character actor of choice when you needed a Jew). Is it any wonder that a film bombed that had so many Jews involved whose scenario was in an Arab country? </span></div><div style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Something rotted in that air of freedom which made the New Hollywood Golden Age possible. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. It was inevitable that the freedom which allowed for realistic depictions of ordinary people with their ugliness intact, with sex, and violence, and emotional turmoil unshielded by a production code, would curdle into freedom's betrayal by making its depictions into something sickeningly exploitative - sometimes freedom's very liberators betrayed it. In the case of Hollywood, what appeared to be a glorious liberation turned out to be merely another swing of the pendulum that landed on equilibrium for a moment before swinging into decadence. Today's Hollywood has a new production code, a code that allows for rivers of blood so long as the violence is confined to an unrealistic genre and its human consequences softpedaled, a code that allows for the naive innocence of children to continue unabated into adulthood with bro comedies about manchildren, a code which only allows romantic comedies in which love's ugly moments are airbrushed out of existence, a code dominated by action movies for which the stars are the special effects. Just as in the old production code, today's Hollywood movies can still be damn good, but in the opinion of this clearly not humble enough narrator, almost none of them show us ourselves. There are ways around the problem - movies like The Social Network and Her and WALL-E and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which only show us a complex image of the human spirit by showing us how technology may have completely reshaped it; or movies like Boyhood or the Before movies or (believe it or not) Borat, in all of which the experimental gimmick that makes them possible is so radically extreme that they can only be done once and never be copied. There are some very fine and human directors working in Hollywood's orbit if not actually 'in' Hollywood: there are at least two American treasures: Alexander Payne and Richard Linklater, both of whom manage in every movie to say something new and elusive about America. Among the 'tribe', there's Jason Reitman, or at least was, who made three of the great American movies at the beginning of his career with Thank You For Smoking, Juno, and Up In The Air, all three of which manage to say something new and elusive about America, and there's John Sayles, whom nobody remembers anymore, but twenty years ago was the God of Independent American Film. There's Ang Lee, who isn't even American, but easily beats Americans at their own game. Errol Morris, the documentarian who makes movies so utterly different from everyone else's that you shouldn't even call them movies by the accepted definition. </span></div><div style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Other than them, there are, as Woody once called them, the Academy of the Overrated: Tarantino, the Coen Brothers, David Lynch, PT Anderson, Wes Anderson (whom in all fairness seems to be improving), Spike Jonze, Charlie Kaufmann, David Fincher, Christopher Nolan, Steven Soderbergh (who at least tries to be more ambitious), Sofia Coppola, Peter Jackson, Ken Burns (it takes a rare talent to make the subjects of his documentaries boring), David O Russell, the Wachowskis, Gus Van Sant, Tim Burton, James Cameron... </span></div><div style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">These are directors so enamored of movies that they jam pack their movies with references to other movies and forget to put references to life in them. Perhaps that statement is unfair, there are exceptions in every one of their outputs, but the exceptions are very few compared to the misfires. There is a kind of ersatz profundity to their movies - movies like The Matrix and Inception and Avatar and I Heart Huckabees (a movie I used to love) with philosophical messages that can fit inside a fortune cookie; a ponderousness which PT Anderson mistakes for profundity, an incomprehensibility which Charlie Kaufmann mistakes for intellectual challenge, a cynical darkness which David Fincher and the Coen Brothers mistake for gravity, an arrested development which Tim Burton and Wes Anderson mistaken for whimsy, a reliance on CGI which Christopher Nolan and the Wachowskis and James Cameron mistake for visual artistry (it's the technicians who are the artists), a reliance on other movies which Tarantino and David Lynch mistake for ironic commentary. In each of these cases, the problem is that they're weighted down by the baggage of movie history. The movies before them were simply too good, so rather than try to compete with them catharsis for catharsis, they dodge the challenge and instead create homages to what older masters did better than they did, and many critics call these postmodern homages 'original' when the only thing that's original about them is their lack of emotional demand on the audience. These are movies about other movies, and therefore perhaps they're movies against movies. Most alarmingly, and prevalent to nearly all of them, are the movies that mistake technology for humanity. Even among the directors unaddicted to CGI, there are more breathtaking shots in today's American movies than ever before. If nature doesn't give you the background you want, if the lighting on some actress's face is not quite what you want, if her jawline is not quite the way you'd like it, you can digitally alter it to any specification you like; but to what end? Today's auteurs have utterly mastered the technical end of filmmaking, and perhaps because we've mastered technique, we've forgotten what the technique is for. &nbsp;</span></div><div style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Meanwhile, people who've devoted their whole lives to film tell us that the world is experiencing a cinematic Golden Age of which the United States is the only first world country who remains excluded. As with so many things about Contemporary America - soccer, news, public transit, languages, condoms, history, black humor, cheap health care, gun laws, and vegetables - we have in America have only the dimmest awareness of the feast that often seems to happen in every corner of the globe but ours because we're too busy playing with our toys. </span></div><div style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Special effects are the new stars of Hollywood. The highest grossing movies are no longer character based movies like The Godfather or Bonnie and Clyde or Midnight Cowboy or Easy Rider or American Graffiti or Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid or The Sting or One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest or MASH or Fiddler on the Roof or Patton. There were plenty of smaller, character driven films during these years that did well, but it was between 1975 and 1990 that technology become the undisputed box office king, and after that came the systematic gutting of movies that portrayed Americans in their natural state in anywhere but independent film and the Miramax ghetto. Just over the other side of 1975 lay the Star Wars Trilogy and Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Indiana Jones and ET and Back to the Future and Roger Rabbit - and how human and full of personality do those early Spielberg and Lucas and Zemeckis movies seem next to the high-grossing movies of our time! Would it surprise anyone that Tom Cruise or Chris Hemsworth or Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson were actually computer programs or robots that only exist on a screen? There was even an Al Pacino movie about that exact notion fifteen years ago called Simone. Maybe Jennifer Lawrence is just an updated Simone, an indication that these computer avatars have improved to the point that seem so like us humans that perhaps humans are indistinguishable now from robots!</span></div><div style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This New New Hollywood came into existence because the knowledge that movies like Caligula and I Spit On Your Grave and Heaven's Gate and Howard the Duck gave us of what we were capable of was too terrible. The freedom to create greater and more uplifting spectacles can also give us things too vile and revolting for contemplation. All it took was less than a dozen movies in which the human animal was presented to us undeniably in all its stinking shit, and the movie world's been running away from its truth ever since.</span></div><div style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Our dearly beloved Producer could have been working on any of these movies, it doesn't matter which, but by the same time the next year, The Producer hadn't worked on a movie for nine months; nine months during which his fists literally performed an abortion on Carmen. Perhaps it became his sole source of satisfaction and relief, because for six months, no glamorous friend returned a call, relieving him not only of his own glamor but the sycophants who glommed onto it. Friendship is fleeting, love mere folly, but how much more true would that be when living in a place known as the 'Dream Factory?' But f</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">ive minutes after every time he went off, he begged her not to leave, just you wait, he'll make you happy again, Hollywood can be something better than its ever been, and you'll be its leading lady!</span></div><div style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Then there was the time the Producer bruised her father up after her father asked about Carmen's bruises. Two minutes later, he gave her Dad a $10,000 wad of cash, then drove him to the emergency room personally in his 1977 Lamborghini Countach. The moment he got through the door, he took out more wads of cash for the doctor and nurses and the other patients - they saw nothing. And while they were in the ER, Carmen's sister practically kidnapped her to a courthouse to make her get a restraining order. Carmen was unwilling, worried she was about to get killed. If not by her producer, then by the guys he'd pay to keep her quiet. The judge listened very patiently and carefully and evinced great compassion for her suffering, he then excused himself to his chamber for five minutes, came back and refused the restraining order. Twelve minutes later, the Producer was at the courthouse, gave Carmen a huge hug and kiss as she sobbed her tears upon him, took her home and told her over and over again how much he loved her. Two days later, they were engaged, and she was the one who wanted to go to the courthouse right away; but he promised her a wedding the whole world would know about, the wedding she deserved.</span></div><div style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Who could turn down the life he promised? This was a man who knew how to turn the curvature of the Earth to the precise angle he wanted. He was the best actor in Hollywood. For more than a decade, he dealt with creative geniuses every day of his life, but he was a genius of life itself. Every event, the most glamorous, the most spiritual, the most transcendent, the most intangible, could be picked apart and reduced to a transaction. Nothing in life was a mystery to him, and all he demanded in return was that she be no more complicated to understand than the concierge in Oviedo.</span></div><div style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Even so, no matter how much of a genius he was, in order to have that wedding, he had to be back in the good graces of Hollywood, and in order to return to Hollywood's graces, he had to be in the graces of multinationals who bought Hollywood up.</span></div><div style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It was just at this moment that our dear Producer, whose tastes in cuisine had always seemed tending to the upscale LA specialties of shellfish, steak, and sushi, seemed to develop a yen for rouladen, kasespatzle, saurbraten, kartoffelknodel, bretzels and wurst. Carmen had no idea why the Producer wanted them to go for German every night, and of course he wouldn't explain except to say that there was a different dish he wanted them to try. One night at Old World German Restaurant, the next at Van Nuys German Deli (a standup counter place for which he still insisted that Carmen wear heels), the next at Alpine Village, and the same every night for five or six weeks. Within a month, the Producer was a good twenty pounds heavier, but the moment Carmen's dress seemed a bit tighter, the Producer did what he could to make her not finish what he ordered for them. She would wrap the remains up and take home what remained in a doggie bag, then find them missing from the fridge the next morning.</span></div><div style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">About five to six weeks in, the Producer pointed to a table across the restaurant. "That's Karlheinz von Huntze, Executive Vice-President of Polygram Entertainment." Until the 60's, Polygram was a third-German, third-Dutch, third-British corporation responsible for no less than seven of the world's major classical music labels and another ten of the world's major Popular Music labels. A number of these labels were all too happy to collaborate with Hitler's culture ministers in times gone by, but Polygram controlled a vast swath of the great musical glories of the gramophone - glories set down before, during, and after the Second World War: Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Earl Hines, Dizzy Gillespe, Woody Herman, Charlie Parker, Bill Evans, Stan Getz, Oscar Petersen, Lester Young, Billie Holiday, Eartha Kitt, untold numbers of Broadway Musicals, Patsy Cline, Loretta Lynn, George Jones, the Rolling Stones and Elvis during some of their best periods, Eric Clapton, Talking Heads, the Ramones, KISS, Billy Joel, Donna Summer, the Village People, the Bee Gees, ABBA, The Osmonds, Yves Montand, Jacques Brel, Edith Piaff, and hundreds of other pop music acts; nearly every major mid-century orchestral conductor, untold numbers of great classical soloists and opera singers and chamber ensembles, the premiere recordings of every postwar work by Benjamin Britten and Ralph Vaughan Williams, untold numbers of moderately obscure and young and unproven composers whom no major label today would take a chance on, the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, the Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam, the London Symphony Orchestra, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra... In 1963, it was Polygram's by then long since subsidiary, the Dutch Phillips Electronics (founded by Karl Marx's uncle), that invented the tape cassette.</span></div><div style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">By 1980, Polygram was surely too big to fail, and yet... its catalogue was simply too large, and it had to either expand significantly to make up for its losses, or shed an enormous part of its product. Since there was very little in music of which they didn't own a significant portion, it was time to move into Movies. What better way to do that than Movie Musicals? Polygram had a 50% share in RSO Records, which gave them a huge profit in the Disco market because RSO Records had the music distribution rights to Grease and Saturday Night Fever. This was in addition to the money made from their contracts with the Bee Gees and the Village People and Donna Summer. Unfortunately, this was nowhere near enough to cover their bill. They needed a movie musical of their own.</span></div><div style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Enter Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band... THE MUSICAL! Yes, all the Beatles hits are here, sung as you've always wanted to hear them sung by Peter Frampton, the Bee Gees, and Steve Martin. With cameos from Aerosmith, Alice Cooper, Earth Wind &amp; Fire, Dr. John, Etta James, Curtis Mayfield, Bonnie Raitt, Frankie Valli, and a hundred other musicians - none of which sing their original music, and narrated by George fucking Burns (now there's a name that'll put the young bums in the seats...). God knows how many hundreds of millions Polygram had to pay to acquire the rights for them from EMI, but it was just another couple hundred million pulled down the drain of this spectacular musical black hole. Ever the artistes, John and George refused to even attend the premiere, no doubt they took the money though; while ever the workhorses, Paul and Ringo went to the premiere, then refused to have anything more to do with the movie, or with Polygram.</span></div><div style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And there sits Karlheinz von Huntze, all sixty-seven years and 350 pounds of him squeezed into a fecally brown suit that probably fit him when he was fifty-five with a badly tied thin tie that didn't reach his naval, unashamed of his brown teeth and double chin that went past his neck, all of which bit with great begeisterung into the giant plate of braten and sauerkraut in front of him, yet vain enough about his hair to wear a spectacularly bad salt and pepper toupee whose base seemed to levitate an inch and a half over his boneless skull and continue six inches up. On his left hand, a wedding ring seems as though it might at any moment pop off his brat-like finger.</span></div><div style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So this was it... The perfect movie musical star - a gorgeously unique looking petite girl with a large head, already well known and liked by everybody in Hollywood, packed to the gills with brains and lungs; no singing lessons necessary, no acting lessons necessary, minimal dancing, can play piano, knows every jazz standard in the Real Book. All it takes is one movie, then she has her choice - greatest living singer or greatest living actress? It's needless to say who's on her arm and advising her every decision.</span></div><div style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And of course, she's brilliant when she talks to Huntze. Within ninety seconds, the Producer excuses himself to the bathroom and seems to stay in there for forty minutes. She speaks to him in the fluent German she picked up from her opera training, they compare the Schubert and Goethe they love best, they sing the Papageno and Pamina duet from Mozart's Die Zauberflote at the table (the restaurant bursts into applause, more for Carmen...). He orders four different deserts, and insists on splitting each of them with her and that she eat up her half to the every mouthful. He gives her a standing invitation to visit him and his wife in Hamburg so she can see the Kunsthalle and the Dichterhallen and walk through the taverns where the young Brahms played, and tells her that he'd love to hear her play piano before he leaves town. He writes down an address of a private residence of a freund at who's place he's staying.</span></div><div style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Of course, very little piano was played. Someone already as thoroughly demoralized as Carmen has no illusions left of the necessities expected of her. If anything, she was thankful for Herr Huntze's patronizing kindness. The cutesy/schatzi German nicknames he gave her, the grandfatherly forcefeeding of Stroh and Obstwasser before geschlechtich verkehren and makronen afterward (which of course came to her mouth via his boneless hand). He told her she was a shoo-in, all she had to do was meet with a few more people at Polygram and they'd make a musical as a vehicle for her! </span></div><div style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It is, of course, needless to tell you that something similar was expected at every new meeting with every member of the Polygram team: Germans, Austrians, Swiss, Dutch, Danish... Old world gentlemen all of them, their courtly manners justifying their sense of entitlement to the world. A few of them were quite attractive - tall, silver-haired gentlemen with immaculately tailored three-piece suits surrounding dark paisley ties or ascots tucked into perfectly pressed shirts; sculpted hair and pencil-thin mustaches above the thin and constantly pursed lips that smoked long thin cigarettes; they wore scarves in the summer and walked with ornate canes - even the young ones seemed old. The bald ones generally had combovers with more mousse than hair, the fat ones always had watch chains on their vests. Never would she leave without an extremely expensive gift - a Channel perfume, a Swarovski Chocolate Box, a De Beer diamond ring, a dress from Christian Dior (and of course, the measurements were perfect). When meeting her at the door they would bend down and kiss her on the hand, or kiss her on each cheek, sometimes three times rather than two. Conversation was always quite pleasant, the meals were always the height of gourmet and gourmand, the wines they picked were amazing (at least when they weren't German...), and occasionally they even flew her to Germany. Karlheinz even got her to the Dichterhallen.</span></div><div style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Producer seemed strangely OK with all this. He never asked her where she was going, gave her free use of whatever car she wanted, and he seemed happier than he'd ever been in their relationship. He was on the phone 18 hours a day, his old friends were his friends again, and during that month when she was in meetings and gaining nearly thirty pounds from all the decadent dishes she'd eaten - which made outfits much tighter and her curves still more alluring - his life was back to a whirlwind of tennis, power lunches, movie pitches from him, and movie pitches to him.</span></div><div style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Early in the evening of September 19th, Carmen returned to the house to find every light in the house on, the mirrors covered, the unshaven Producer wearing what looked like a white bathrobe and a fisherman's cap on his head, but all of the cap but the bill was covered by a blindingly white shawl with blue stripes over his head. Carmen knew that it was obviously a tallis, but it was much longer than any she'd ever seen before. He was standing in the corner of his living room, his back to the wall, bending his torso up and down at the speed of sound as he read from a black book while his lips moved with barely any sound at all at the speed of light. He didn't even seem to notice her, and as she walked in his line of vision, she saw that not only was he wearing his favorite tie, but the tie was cut in the middle, almost the entire way through.</span></div><div style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Before she could even ask what was wrong, he looked at her and emphatically intoned:</span></div><div style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">"Vahyigah hadawvawr el meylekh nineveh mikis'aw va'yo'aw'ver ahdahrtaw meyawlawv."</span></div><div style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And then he began to walk directly towards her, staring her deadly cold in the eye and taking a step a few inches forward with every seven words:</span></div><div style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">"For the word came unto the King of Nineveh and he arose from his throne and he laid his throne from him and covered him with sackcloth and sat in ashes and he caused it to be proclaimed and published through Nineveh by the decree of the King and his nobles saying let neither man nor beast nor herd nor flock taste any thing let them not feed nor drink water but let man and beast be covered with sackcloth and cry mightily unto Adonai yea let them turn every one from his evil way and from the violence that is in their hands."</span></div><div style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">He then stared at his hand for a moment that seemed like fifteen, as unaware as she was about what he was about to do.</span></div><div style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">"You didn't get the part."</span></div><div style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And then he dislodged her cornea.</span></div><div style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">-----------------------------------------------------</span></div><div style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This is the last we will ever say of the particulars of physical abuses perpetrated upon Carmen, and while he can make no promises, the narrator very much hopes that this is the last time he feels the need to elucidate any details of gendered violence in what will hopefully become a mega/meta-novel that takes decades to write for many, many hundreds of pages, if ever. We do, however, have to speak rather lengthily about the repercussions of what was perpetrated upon Carmen, but fortunately, the details of that will proceed organically from the story - with some digressions of course...</span></div><div style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">"Of course you can stay at my place. However long you need to. I hope you don't mind though, my housemate has a friend staying on our sofa but my room has a foldout couch."</span></div><div style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Steve lets Carmen in, they walk into his room, she sees the 250 books on his shelves, she sees the violin case on the fold-out couch, she sees the projector screen covering the window and the projector at the far end of the room with a pile of classic movie canisters as tall as she is; the proverbial cat is out of the bag and she breaks down weeping. Steve holds Carmen to console her, but he has no idea what he's consoling, and while he asks, he's not about to push the matter.</span></div><div style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">When Carmen finally feels better, she walks over to the canisters, picks out Casablanca, and for two hours they lie down and decide that the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world... It's a Monday night. On Tuesday, they watch The Best Years of Our Lives. On Wednesday, It's A Wonderful Life. Thursday, City Lights. Friday, It Happened One Night. Saturday, &nbsp;The Philadelphia Story. Sunday, Steve finally shows her his favorite movie: Sunrise; meaning not that his favorite movie is somewhere between a pretentious statement about nature and a pickup line, but Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans, the 1927 masterpiece co-awarded the first ever Best Picture Oscar (even in the first year of the Oscars they could award it all to the best movie...) and a movie that should reduce every living being to a puddle of feelings by its end. It was directed by F.W. Murnau, a young German moviemaker recently immigrated to the United States, who might have proven greater than either Hitchcock or Welles had a car accident not claimed him four years later.</span></div><div style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">On this, Steve and I completely agree, Sunrise is more than a simply great film. To me it is, next to Citizen Kane, nothing less than the cornerstone of all movies ever made in this country. The dawn at the end of Sunrise is not simply a metaphor for the dawn of a reinvigorated rural marriage, it is a metaphor for the American dawn, for the dawn of movies themselves, for the dawn of witnessing art enacted for us by our fellow humans on a durable screen rather than in our imaginations from a flimsy piece of paper; for the dawn of a modern era when the hope of the New World emerges from the despair of the Old - for the passing of the torch from a world that once coveted Northern European ideals like civilization, education, and culture, to a world that coveted American ideals like life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Perhaps these new ideals will prove equally unfulfillable to the old ones, but not yet at least, and while there's no doubt that it's hokey to say that the Sun rose on a new day with this movie, it's no less true for being hokey.</span></div><div style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It's probably worth mentioning that some night after one of these movies, they have sex for the first time, and perhaps nearly as importantly, Steve has sex for the first time; this era was a few years before it became a given that 95% of students would lose their virginity by the end of college. I'd like to say that they first did it after they watched "It Happened One Night," but that is much too on the nose...</span></div><div style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Steve, like most men, particularly most young men who've never had sex before, has no idea what might cause women discomfort, even if it might seem obvious to them in distant retrospect. It somehow never occurred to him that even a woman as intelligent as Carmen might dislike a movie in which a man who attempts to work up the nerve to drown his pure, Aryan-looking country wife (you can tell how innocent she is by her long blond hair wrapped in a tight bun) so he can take up full time with his knowing city tramp of a mistress with a nose slightly too large to not escape a semitic connotation, but if that's not enough to get the point, you can tell how 'knowing' she is from her black hair cut into a flapper haircut...), whom he also tries to kill when she suggests killing his wife to him - but </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">both times, being the splendidly ethical man he is at heart, </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">he manages to stop himself, and after his nearly killing the two women closest to him in twenty minutes, he resolves to redeem himself because of the purity of his wife's being and sufferance in his ignoring her, his wandering eye, and his bad mind for business that puts their country farm in danger. </span><br /><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">After he stands over her, his hands lurched outward in the manner of exaggerated silent movie murderousness as he attempts to work up the murderous nerve to throw her overboard from a canoe on a lake, she waits for her coward of a husband to row back ashore so she can abscond to a bus heading to the city, and he runs after her, begging her not to be afraid of him. She can't escape the iron grip of a husband a foot taller and wider in frame, and as he holds onto her, they wander into a city church, and they watch and listen as a clearly Lutheran priest officiates an expensive city wedding and intones from a cue card "God is giving you in the holy bonds of matrimony, a trust. She is young... and inexperienced. Guide her and love her... ...keep and protect her from all harm. Wilt thou LOVE her?" At which point this wayward, murderous hulk of a man becomes a teary and dewy eyed portrait of remorse who collapses into the lap of his suffering wife like Jesus in a pieta consoled by the Virgin Mary. Because what clearly matters is the husband's suffering, not the wife's.</span><br /><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And if that's not enough to make the Carmens of this world cringe, there's then the moment in the beauty parlor, when the wife runs away in horror from a barber with the temerity to try to take her hair out of its virginal bun - her purity thankfully intact. Then there's the set piece with another 'knowing floozy' who tries to give the husband a manicure, suggestively pulling his hand out from underneath the barber's smock, only for him to swat away her ministrations to his wife's all-consuming relief. A moment later, when an upper-class man tries to get fresh with this innocent country wife and breaks off one of the flowers bought her by her husband to put into his lapel, the husband emerges from under the barber's smock, freshly shaved, and this so recently almost murderer draws a pocket knife, only to nip the flower off as the gentleman covers his neck with his hand, clearly certain that the husband was about to give him what the OJ Simpson defense team called the Colombian Necktie. </span><br /><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And yet, amid all this psychotic violence is the simple story of a married couple falling back in love with one another by experiencing a new facet of life - an innocent rural couple, firmly fastened to the prison of country life's slowness that's caused so much desperation and longing in modern literature, arriving in the bustle and activity of the city to find the life and action for which they ache, and arrive at that perverse balance between the innocence of children and the tragic knowledge of adulthood's sacrifices that is romance - that bond we all seek, the eternal spring of life's being, the fleeting moments we wish are forever, when life as must happen disappears and all that remains is life as we wish it to be. And yet in order for life to occur as we wish it to be, life must be disappointing enough to form our wishes. </span><br /><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And after bits with a drunk pig, impossible to explain, accidentally breaking the head off a statue during some horseplay, making out in what the emotion seems to transform a crowded thoroughfare into the Garden of Eden, and then drunkenly making out as flying angels form ring around them, shortly before which the husband wants to beat up yet another upper-class twit for suggesting that the couple do a country dance for a large city crowd - which they do to the city dweller's eruptive delight. </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">They sail home by moonlight, 'a second honeymoon' the wife calls it with all the literalness of a pure country girl, her errant husband, who nearly drowned her on the same boat that morning, as in love as he probably was on their first honeymoon. She falls into blissful sleep upon his chest, and he gently places the lapel of his jacket over her face, in twelve hours, turning into good husband again who protects his wife. </span><br /><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">But in these days before doppler radar, a frenzied storm erupts as suddenly as the moonlight seemed eternal but </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">a moment ago</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">. Even the city dwellers duck for cover. The calmness of the lake upon which they live turns into a roaring sea, as the pure and terrified country wife holds onto her husband for dear life, preventing him from doing the rowing necessary to save them.</span><br /><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">The desperate husband wakes the whole town up and forms a search party on the lake. She survives by holding onto a bundle of bamboo picked and placed into the boat by his mistress - but not before he tries to kill his mistress yet again, this time, nearly succeeding, and we're half-rooting for him to be successful! But a figure who is probably the wife's mother tells him that she's been found and is alive. He comes back to her bedside and sits by it for the rest of the night, the entire town relieved and overjoyed that one of their own is not lost. The movie ends with the wife awakening, her long hair all the way down, bedecked in a white nightgown and white sheets, her roughly four-year-old son sleeping by her side, she awakens at the rising of the sun to her husband by her bedside, and they share a kiss that dissolves into rays of sunlight and the burst of the sun. Is it not the most beautiful image in all of cinema?</span><br /><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">18 hours after this husband almost became a wife-murderer and a few minutes after he almost becomes a mistress murderer, his wife awakens, and they live on, if not happily ever after, then redeemed with a second chance at life - the seemingly redeemed husband seemingly proven utterly deserving of happiness and forgiveness, never mind that had he remained a good husband, the life of his wife would never have been in danger, let alone twice, let alone that the first of the two times, he was the direct cause of the danger, never mind that he was almost became a murderer yet again just a moment before his reunion with his wife. </span></div><div style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Sunrise is exactly as melodramatic a movie as it sounds like, with those utterly unbelievable silent movie gestures and a dramaturgy that wouldn't be believable in a Christmas pageant. And yet it should matter not a whit. Its melodrama is just a symptom of the metaphysical drama taking place onscreen. The metaphorical stakes are nothing less than a human soul, the husband's soul. What yetzer will the soul embrace? Will evil be rewarded and virtue punished? Is a redeemed soul that once strayed deserving of any reward? &nbsp;As melodramatic as Sunrise is, these are not questions easy to answer, and as any Hollywood movie must, Sunrise tries to answer them definitively, and yet it cannot. How many days before the husband erupts again in a violent rage? How many days before he tires of the farm and eye wanders again to another city girl who's probably named Rachel. </span></div><div style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Sunrise speaks to us from another world where cynicism has yet to be invented. Men are men, strapping, quick to anger, quick to lust, quick to violence, yet able to be soothed by the purity of love, for which it is a woman's holy duty - a duty she can either assume, thereby becoming like an intercessing goddess, or reject, thereby becoming a whore. It is very easy to be cynical about such movies, and yet one's critical faculties feel an overwhelming urge to melt in the presence of such sincerity. Just as in the music of Bach or the painting of Rafael; Murnau arrived on world history at a very specific moment when his chosen artform was on an indivertible course to conquer the world with its power. 1927 was the final full year of film's Silent Era, and the very moment when visual storytelling blossomed in a manner never seen before and perhaps never since. In this final twilight of Silent Film, everything about the visual components of movies become as fluid and poetic as ballet - sets, lighting, costumes, exposures, even overacting: Sunrise, Metropolis, Faust, Flesh and the Devil, Mare Nostrum, The Son of the Sheik, Sparrows, The Temptress, What Price Glory?, The Winning of Barbara Worth, It, The Italian Straw Hat, London After Midnight, The General, Pandora's Box, The Crowd, The Wind, Underworld, The Unknown, Steamboat Bill Jr., An Andalusian Dog, Lonesome, The Passion of Joan of Arc, Queen Kelly, Sadie Thompson, Show People, Diary of a Lost Girl, The Lodger, Man With a Movie Camera, The Last Command, The Docks of New York, The Circus, 7th Heaven. Just as it was forty-five years later, there was something magic in the cellophane - but the magic dissipated far more quickly. The Golden Age our parents may currently reminisce upon took sixteen years between Bonnie and Clyde on one side and The Right Stuff on the other. The Golden Age which their grandparents remembered began around 1926 and was all over by 1929, but for those threeish years, all a director seemingly had to do was be competent at his job, and he'd create something eternal. </span></div><div style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">There were flashier directors after Murnau who had much more trenchant insights into human nature</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">, but insight into humans would dilute everything which makes Murnau so special. Just as with Bach, I doubt there is a single artist in his medium who can make you believe again in everything about life about which you've abandoned all hope. If you're close to suicide, watch Sunrise. You may have thought yourself a cynic, but all bad feeling melts in the presence of its beauty - it is the beauty of dawn, of hope, of the idea that not a single person in the entire world is beyond redemption or undeserving of it. It tells the sinner within us all that no matter how badly we oppress others, we are not beyond mercy. It is the kind of hope that those of us privileged enough to feel will use as resolve to take our instinct toward sin and use it for virtue while having to question no longer what is virtuous: to move mountains, to overthrow governments, to build societies, to make a girl who was nearly a movie star into the love of your life.</span></div><div style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And all this is precisely everything that Carmen least wanted to hear or see at this moment. Carmen was probably much too close to her agonies to experience anything like a trigger for reliving them, but the idea that a man who is so clearly evil can achieve redemption so quickly was everything that contradicted the last eighteen months of her life. When a man has murder in his heart, there is no redemption for him, and even if there is perhaps an infinitesimal possibility of redemption, it's certainly not something the man discovers over the course of a single fucking day. </span></div><div style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Steve did not see her rolling her eyes and grinding her teeth and tensing up her hands in the darkness of his room. He often looked over at her to gauge her reaction, but never caught her at any particularly expressive moment. As we men do 95% of the time, he saw what we wished to see in this particular woman, and if men much more experienced and confident around women than young Steve have no idea what women are thinking, then how was Steve to know? And therefore it came as quite a shock to him when Carmen let out an enormous guffaw toward the end when this prodigally murderous husband kneels in a state of grace at the bedside of his utterly saintly, unblemishable, wife.</span></div><div style="font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The second after Carmen let out her roaring cackle, she apologized profusely, as anyone in a new relationship would after guffawing at a potential significant other's favorite movie. When Steve immediately turned the movie off and light on, she went somewhat limp, as though the dread coursing through her heart dissociating herself from the room before she had to experience the inevitable melodrama that would ensue. But, to her astonishment, Steve was extremely interested in knowing what she thought.</span></div><div style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">But for one of the first times in her life, the inkwell of her verbal acuity had dried, and she was at a loss to explain precisely what she found so offensive about the movie.</span></div><div style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Why did she weep when she saw his books? Because for the last few weeks, she'd found herself unable to recall what she'd read. Books were, to her, something to access with instant neurological availability. One glance at a piece of paper, and it was committed by heart for life. Whole tractates of the King James Bible, whole acts by Shakespeare, whole chapters of the Quixote and whole stories by Kafka she could recite in the original Castillian Spanish and Prague German with the exact pronunciation of its location and period, whole piano concertos by Mozart - both the solo piano part and the orchestral score, whole albums of Edith Piaf and whole operas by Verdi which she was able to sing and play on the piano as though it were second nature, not only able to sing any jazz standard or song by Dylan or The Beach Boys or trash song by Herman's Hermits or Tiny Tim, but able to improvise half-hour piano solos around them with countermelodies and modulations and thematic interpolations of a dozen other songs by the same artist and a dozen more by the artists they influenced and the artists who influenced them. Any one of which she could summon to mind and memory as though by animal instinct, as naturally as the rest of us take a breath or eat a meal after a day's fasting; any one of which were available to call to mind for an audition.</span></div><div style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Her parents had no idea where she came from. They were rural immigrants like any rural immigrants, perhaps a bit better at what they did than most, and perhaps assimilated a bit more easily into American life than some did. Music was not something they made themselves, but at they were aware of music and loved it, and surely all four their own parents were musical - folk musicians to whom a career in music, or any career at all, was an utterly alien concept. When they weren't fishing or farming or selling their goods, they played the quena and the bandolina and banduryia and the bukhot; national instruments of the Philippines and Colombia, where their days were spent as farmers and fishermen, and nights around campfires and oil lamps with Tinkling and Muisca dancing - a life that could just as easily take place in either 1600 AD or BC as in 1940. You got up in the morning, you served your particular God, you did your best to avoid other spirits, and you went to sleep until one unsuspecting night when sleep claimed you. &nbsp;Legendary family stories developed around particular members of the family, but you didn't know if these family members died a few years before you were born, or a few hundred years; maybe even a few thousand. Perhaps variations on these particular stories were common to every family, every town, every region of the world, and perhaps all these folk tunes are just as similar from place to place. But because these stories and this music have no historical record, they seem infinitely more authentic - coming to us from that ether generated by the long darkness of pre-history, when the world was only explicable through magic. Life itself was magic, any day when a person was shielded from death was its own miracle that required a supernatural explanation. Every respite from death was a beautiful gift, every object of order that endowed life with ever so slightly more convenience was wrested from the chaos of nature, and therefore an object of indescribable beauty that could not be conceived had it not already existed. For a moment in these people's lives of whom we have no record, these artful objects did not imitate nature as so much humdrum art does, but rewrites nature's very laws, and therefore every folk tune was beautiful and perfect, every folk tale was beautiful and perfect, every pot and plate was beautiful and perfect, every meal was beautiful and perfect, all of them gifts handed down from above and below by forces well beyond their understanding, because they were all wrested from a nature that would never guarantee a life with the presence of any of them, and the presence of any of these gifts from the spiritual realm was a gift to be savored until the spiritual realm claimed them back. A pot, a plate, an instrument, could so easily break. A musician or a storyteller could die. The fish could disappear from the water, the crops not grow, the animals disappear from the forest. And where there was light, darkness would descend upon the face of the deep.</span></div><div style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Miracles were not supposed to happen in America, and yet, here was the miracle that was Carmen Chavez - with all the advances in technique, here was a person who overcame technique and played with it as a baby does with a rattle. Perhaps she's a second Mozart, perhaps she's even a Shakespeare of performance - someone for whom a career as arm candy in a Burt Reynolds movie would be utterly wasted. She should be playing and singing Poulenc and Schubert at Carnegie Hall, she should be playing and singing Cleopatra and Sally Bowles on the West End.</span></div><div style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Her parents, both of them, stopped going to church when they came to this country, but when Carmen sang lullabyes back to her mother when she was six months old, when she was speaking entire sentences at nine months in Spanish, English, and Tagalog, reading in all three languages by a little after her second birthday, and reading adult books by four years old. It was shortly after her fourth birthday that her parents had confirmation that something extraordinary was happening to their daughter - perhaps a literal confirmation. They flew back for a cousin's confirmation in Bagota when she was four, and during the celebration in the downstairs church rec room, somebody had broken into the organ loft and made the whole church resound with the note perfect melody of Alma Redemptoris Mater. After the melody was complete, it was played a second time with harmonies, and the harmonies were completely different than the usual organist, perhaps simpler but they worked just as well, perhaps better. But this was no teenage amateur breaking in - both the door and the organ were simply unlocked, and little Carmen, four years old but barely looking three, sitting down on a bench upon which her legs were barely long enough to reach the end of, let alone reach the pedals, and played on a keyboard all by herself. The organist was eating bandeja paisa and drinking aguardiente just as everybody else was, so he stormed up to the organ loft with his ever-ready switch, expecting to find some teenager with a year of piano lessons who broke in and possibly damaged the door. But the moment he saw this girl barely larger than an infant play Alma Redemptoris Mater, he dared not make his presence known until she was done. When she was, he picked her up, he kissed her on the forehead and told her she was a miracle from Heaven. He carried her downstairs to tell her parents, they wept as they knelt down in front of a statue of the Virgin. It was a miracle such as those of which their own parents always spoke. For twenty years, they never missed a Sunday, and every spare dollar not devoted to good works was devoted to music lessons for an extraordinary child who came from nowhere. </span></div><div style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The only way she could have known about these keys was on those few times her father took her to see Uncle Ray (who couldn't see her of course), and Uncle Ray would play some songs on the piano for her while Carmen's father fixed some wiring in the lights (why Ray Charles needed lights nobody knew...) and Carmen watched the keys which Uncle Ray could not see as he played. As Carmen progressed, Uncle Ray was all too happy to give an occasional lesson in jazz whenever he was in town, and after the lesson was over, Carmen would be sent to play with a friend down the street with a couple dollars for candy while Uncle Ray gave Carmen's mother a lesson too. </span></div><div style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">When Carmen's Ina told Uncle Ray heard about what happened, he sat her at the piano, and instead of playing Alma Redemptoris Mater, she harmonized a note perfect and slightly out of tempo What Would I Do Without You and sang the whole song, a few words were mispronounced as a four-year-old would without thinking of what she can't understand: "I get all closer to me," instead of "Aw, get all closer to me." Even a brilliant four-year-old plays like a brilliant four-year-old, but a four year old like this could astonish the world.</span></div><div style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This narrator has little to no interest in the details of how she appeared on Ed Sullivan and Dick Clark's American Bandstand when she was seven. He has only a little interest in the details of the private piano teacher from Hungary, Mr. Nordau (Doctor Nordau), contracted directly from Universal Studios by Uncle Ray, who paid every cent of those lessons for twelve years, the methods and personal manner of Dr. Nordau turned her into an obedient girl savant until her fingertips bled. He would balance a coin upon her hands to teach her finger positioning, and when the coin fell off he would strike the hand with a ruler. By nine she'd already graduated from Beethoven Sonatas to Liszt Transcendental Etudes, so the red letter day was not when she mastered a new piece, it was when she graduated from a dime on her hand to a penny, from a penny to a nickel, from a nickel to a quarter. He also has little to no interest in the details of in the details of the other upper-middle-class immigrant teachers from Germany and Austria and Poland and Romania and Czechoslovakia and Italy and the Ukraine who taught her in the high school for science she insisted upon going to rather than a school for the performing arts, or who coached her in the various extracurriculars for which her abilities and work ethic could only be described, once again, as prodigious: drawing, dancing, German, French, Italian, English, creative writing, calculus, chemistry, biology, physics, philosophy, theology, history, current events... Still greater than her ability to assimilate information was how each teacher took it upon themselves, as though they were the only one to do so, to try to mentor Carmen and steer her in the direction of their field, as though netting such a prize achiever into their field would be the achievement that justified decades of surrendering some prestigious post-Hochshule career to put up with every worthless and verzogenes Gor und wildes Tier in the security of Southern California.</span></div><div style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">How did she imbibe so much information so quickly? Well, if one can reduce such ability to a practical application rather than divinely-mandated ability, her technique was to simply sing her facts. From the moment at five years old that she realized "Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally" could be sung to the famous tune from Eine Kleine Nachtmusik if you put an extra 'please' on that ending D, she realized that she could find the right piece of music to assimilate any degree of information she wished. But as I'm sure you've guessed by now, what unfortunately matters in Carmen's story is not the ascent, but the descent.</span></div><div style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So you'll unfortunately have to permit me to fast forward to five years later, sometime around 1984, when it came time to name their first daughter. Steve and Carmen already had two 'failed' pregnancies to their confution before Cleo came into the world, miscarried because of what the doctor so tactfully referred to as an 'incompetent uterus.' Due to a division in the uterine septum, the children could not derive nourishment from their mother. They therefore passed all too quickly into lavatorial oblivion. I don't remember whether it was the second or the third time that Carmen sprained her pelvis during which Steve asked an OBGYN to take a look and see if the uterine canal could be repaired during the same time that the orthopedist tried to mend the pelvic damage.</span></div><div style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Surely enough, six months after the surgery, Carmen had a green light to get pregnant again, and nine months later, they commemorated that joyous day by naming their first daughter Clarissa, in part after Virginia Woolf's most famous creation, but in part to commemorate the day when they first got together and Steve helped Carmen to understand what became their favorite book: Mrs. Dalloway, but mostly because Steve's mother insisted that the daughter be named after her own recently departed mother, Clara, who came to Los Angeles from Berlin in 1936 with a four-year-old daughter hidden in a large suitcase with some holes punched out for air while a husband and two pubescent boys were stranded in Germany.</span></div><div style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It was all pretty hard until 1992. Carmen's capacity as a pianist became more and more reduced. By 1987, she could not play for more than an hour at a time without straining a muscle in her hand. By 1992, the strain became a sprain. By 1998, it was a half-hour before she'd break a finger. By 2001, it was the length of a Chopin Waltz played at pianissimo, and then she had to close the piano for the rest of the day. By 2004, she'd forgotten that she couldn't play; she would sight read whatever music was on the piano stand, and would negotiate around the two or three digits she'd already broken in the days and weeks preceding with a howling scream cutting off whatever once beloved Schumann character piece or Schubert Impromptu or Debussy Prelude caught her attention from the piano stand (their younger daughter made sure to put different music on the piano every day so there wouldn't be the same piece resounding around the house forever).</span></div><div style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Through it all, Carmen still had her gorgeous voice, which thirty-five years of cigarettes could not wreck, even if it moved her voice down a half-dozen fachs. Unfortunately, she realized that any kind of performance, any at all, might put her straight into the public's black eye because of her time with The Producer. Who knows to what she could yet again subject herself, or to what she could subject her family? To remind people that another paramour of this producer still stalked the streets of LA like a ghost could reopen all manner of old trauma, put the life of everyone she cared about at risk from people The Producer might pay to silence her before she talks, and might make a scandal of her life and her childrens' to the press. She and Steve both agreed that she had to stay away from the stage until The Producer was dead, not even so much as a dinner theater. The Producer was still around Hollywood, one of the many ghosts of Hollywood infamy, a low-level, stipended producer allowed to walk around the studio lots, absorbing the sun like a vegetable as he 'supervised' B-movie releases, which the New New Hollywood let him refer to as his 'comeback.' The comeback necessitated many tabloid magazine and TV stories which would plaster his many sins and conquests and legends ten years after his trivial comeback seemed like any comeback at all. Once every two months there was another scoop chasing journalist calling Carmen, not talk about her story, but about the story of the woman Carmen was left for - Tamera Wittenberg. No comment of course.</span></div><div style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Nobody could figure out of Tamera Wittenberg was European Royalty or white trash from Kansas, but she was tall, twig-like, leggy and blond in precisely that way which the charitable call statuesque and the uncharitable call a bimbo, but the 80's called perfect beauty. It's true, she didn't seem like a great brain, but she was as quiet as a mouse and submissive as a dog with its belly up. She was never anything but polite to Carmen.</span></div><div style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Carmen however, had nowhere else to go, and was, in fact, living in a room down the hall from the Producer for the first five months that Tammy and The Producer were involved. Carmen had no job, and even after The Producer took up with Tammy, she was understandably worried that The Producer would go ballistic if she showed any initiative outside his house, so for five months, she simply stayed in the house, she read, she went to school, she went back to her room, where the maid would leave a meal for her at her doorstep.</span></div><div style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This continued for five months, she would speak to The Producer when spoken to, and occasionally he would visit with her in her room - where discourse was at least a bit more civil than it used to be, and congress a bit more gentle. But one day, Carmen heard the same shouts and shattering of glass and turning over furniture and whimpering tears that she knew so well from time past emanating from the bedroom that once was hers. It was eight-thirty in the morning; she immediately walked out the room without a single possession. She walked from The Producer's Beverly Hills house to which she belonged for eighteen months to the USC campus to meet with Steve three hours later, and life resumed as well as it could.</span></div><div style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Carmen wanted to teach voice, but unfortunately, there is never enough market for a voice teacher and far too much market for piano teachers. One would think that parents would go mad with the desire to teach their children most basic musical skill in the world, but singing is so basic that there is no mark of respectability to it. The piano, rather, is the ultimate mark of respectability. If one can carry a tune, one can sing. But to play a piano well is no less an achievement than building your own house or creating beautiful woodwork and clay pots. In Europe, America, or Asia, child who plays piano well is the ultimate mark of a family that wrested order from the existential chaos of living in a lower social class.</span></div><div style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Back in the 80's, there was a full roster of piano students whom she taught while Steve watched the kids, but Carmen knew that there were many better piano teachers in the area, so she kept her prices much lower and hoped that volume would cover the expenses which her billing would certainly not. As so many music teachers are, she was in no way cut for a job of managing children; managing their anxious mothers who want to believe their child another Horowitz, managing their bored fathers - more interested in picking her up than his children. Even among her few intermediate-level students, she knew she could never impart any valuable musical ideas to indifferent children whose parents assured them that they would understand why they needed to play piano when they were older. She was becoming like so many of her teachers who wanted better for her, and she did not understand why this new generation of students were so much less obedient than she once was. Her frustration with her charges was continually palpable to them, and most of the kids who'd been with her longest would dread their lessons in a way that ensured any inclination toward practicing killed in its inception. A few times a year, another student would break down in tears mid-lesson, and a call would follow a few days later from the mother: "Jessica has too much on her plate."</span></div><div style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">All through this life-era, Steve lost as much money as he made. Even with health insurance, the surgeries Carmen needed ever more direly were a fortune each to each - and the more surgeries she needed, the higher her premiums went, until she was just plain uninsurable and their family policy was cancelled. Steve and the children had to each get an individual plan, but Carmen was on her own, corrective surgery after orthopedic surgery after cardiothoracic surgery, and eventually even neurological surgery.</span></div><div style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Furthermore, matter how long since she left The Producer for him, Steve feared that Carmen was accustomed to a luxury he couldn't possibly provide, and couldn't possibly admit he couldn't provide. If she hadn't bought a new dress or jewel in a month, Steve would buy her one (to the very end, Carmen was immaculately dressed). But not even Carmen's needs and wants, or the thought of a baby Steve thought Carmen couldn't possibly carry to term, were enough to keep Steve an accountant. When Steve told his mother he was about to go into business with a friend to operate a video store, her screams woke baby Clarissa up.</span></div><div style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Steve's father was more supportive and said to give it, and their son, a chance to do what he wants, but his mother was right. Even in 1980's Los Angeles, there wasn't enough demand for a local independent to carve out a share of the market from Blockbuster Video. Had they closed in 1986, Steve would still have possession over the money from his accounting days to pay off their loan. But Steve and his friend kept borrowing to keep it going until early '88, by which time the bank came to repo everything in his house while his four year old daughter absorbed her first vivid memories and his wife tried to calm their screaming six-month-old second daughter: Elizabeth. The furniture, the silverware, the fridge, the beds, the piano, the violin, the books - all 900 of them, the 3700 VHS tapes, even the film cannisters and the projector equipment from college. We were lucky they didn't take the house. For the next five years, Carmen had to teach piano from a four-and-a-half octave Yamaha keyboard which her stepfather bought for her.</span></div><div style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Steve did the only thing a real man can do in that situation, he went to his parents for a loan. His mother gave him a big hug, and of course she told him that of course they would, but he knew the condition.</span></div><div style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So Steve went back to managing managing books and accounts at the very same bank that repossessed everything he owned. At least they knew him... But when he applied for a job interview, the very last place where thought he'd get an interview, the place he applied to as a private joke, was the first to call him back. Nobody seemed to remember that they took his entire life away from him just a month ago. Perhaps they did, but they were too polite to mention it, or perhaps they were trying to make it up to him; or perhaps he was too generic to remember, or perhaps he was just another anonymously bad investment vehicle among thousands. Nobody checks your credit score when you're applying to be the man who checks the credit score. All they knew was that he had shining recommendations from the last bank at which he worked, high academic honors from the Marshall School of Business, and a mother who threatened to take her account elsewhere.</span></div><div style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Steve stuck with his mother's agreement in good faith for three years. Again and again, he offered to repay the loan, but his parents wouldn't hear of it. Every day was miserable, this was the price he paid for doing nothing but watch movies and change diapers for three years, but Steve had a life again. He was making $35,000 a year, but after taxes it was all pocketable money thanks to his parents (his mother's) loan and their agreement to pay for any further surgeries Carmen needs. His beautiful wife learned to spend on a budget surprisingly well, his daughters were brilliant and the older one already showed some flashes of her mother's former brilliance.</span></div><div style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In 1991, Steve returned to his mother with a check for the entirety of the loan. He didn't pay for the surgeries &nbsp;"I'm going into business again and I've quit my job."</span></div><div style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">"Please tell me..."</span></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">"No it's not in video."</span></div><div style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It wasn't even movie related. Of course his mother refused to accept the check, and she was actually slightly enthused when she heard his plan, though not as enthused as she might have been. It's LA, people need protection from crime, and he was going to become his friend's junior partner and manage the distribution of car alarms.</span></div><div style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It wasn't a bad idea. His parents had been burgled twice in the last five years. Sure, Fairfax was not the neighborhood it once was, but you never used to expect anything like that kind of crime can happen to you. Why can't Steve go into home alarm?</span></div><div style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The date Steve stood up to his mother was March 2nd, 1991. The next day, Rodney King would get the pulp beaten from him at the corner of Foothill Boulevard and Osborne Street. Business was slow for fourteen months thereafter. Steve was drawing a salary, but while home alarm was something every white person thought he needed, too few people seemed to think they need a car alarm.</span></div><div style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">But on April 29th, 1992, Reginald Denny and Fidel Lopez were pulled from their cars and beaten on camera as a racial maelstrom deluged its way through the City of Angels, and car alarms become something everyone thought they needed, not because their cars might be stolen, but because a car alarm can surely be what saves you when a pack of marauders attack you while still in a car you can lock, and all you have to defend yourself is a vehicle made of steel that can go up to 200 miles-per-hour.</span></div><div style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">By June, Steve, who'd never made a salary higher than $40,000, was pulling in $50,000 a month, and would continue to do so for the duration of the 90's - roughly $90,000 a month in the currency of a quarter-century later.</span></div><div style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It was also in 1992 that Steve's father passed away quite suddenly; an apparent heart attack while behind the wheel of his SUV, but Steve's mother didn't want an autopsy to confirm it. No sooner than her husband passed did Steve's mother want to be all the more in the lives of her only child and granddaughters. But no longer had Steve to rely on his mother for loans, no longer had Steve to rely on his mother for advice, no longer had Steve to rely on his mother for support. In the 80's, when Steve and Carmen went out on the weekends, they would drop the kids off with Steve's parents, and his mother would keep a close eye on the kids, but in the 90's, they could hire a stunningly cheap Spanish-speaking nanny. In the 80's, when Carmen needed surgery and neither Steve nor either of her parents or step-parents could pay for it, Steve's mother would sign checks with no questions, except for many private words with her son about how disappointed she was that he married such a high-maintenance woman. But in the 90's, Steve made more money in a year than his parents made in ten. In the 80s, Steve's mother would call four days a week, full of advice and opinions, and her son would listen to them all patiently and with seeming cheer. In the 90's, Steve was sometimes too busy to even take his Mom's call once a week.</span></div><div style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Steve's mother - whom we'll call Denarius, not because that was her name but because that was the only thing anybody ever called her which she liked - didn't exactly hold her tongue about her opinions of her son's ingratitude, but she at least held it by her own standards. Even if she complained constantly to relatives whom she knew Steve never had any time for, she never complained about Steve's newfound independence to Steve himself. Perhaps Steve was right to be uninterested in his extended family, they never really forgave Denarius for marrying outside the faith, but her relatives all lived in San Francisco and Los Angeles, but how many semites were there in Pismo Beach?</span></div><div style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Steve's grandmother Clara, his Oma, wanted a future for a daughter with no father, no brothers, no money, no English. These supercilious ersatz Yekke relatives were born in Frankfurt and came to America as children more than fifty years ago. They made millions in schmatteh factories in which worked lots of Jews who had the bad foresight to came over only later when there were more of us, when business was already tougher, and when Jewish immigrants didn't have much money to bring with them.</span></div><div style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Aside from the suits and dresses they wore on all occasions, no matter how warm the weather, these relatives might as well have been from another planet - Russia even... Jewel-encrusted rings on half their fingers, necklaces for every day of the week, cars for both the husband and the wife which chauffeurs usually drove, a dinner fit for Shabbos every night. And yet, it was the Great Depression, so apparently they had very little money they could lend a supposedly cherished relative with a kleines Madchen. Sympathy, sympathy, sympathie for their plight, a job in the factory, but not even enough additional money to pay the rent, and not a cent offered to her try to bribe Clara's family out of Berlin.</span></div><div style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Los Angeles was a big city, but Clara knew she wasn't wanted there. If her only remaining relatives wanted to keep her side of the family as small as possible, then she knew she had to go elsewhere to give her daughter a new family.</span></div><div style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">She meant to go up to San Francisco, but as so often happens in these immigrant stories, the only Auto she could afford to buy broke down in a smaller city, Pismo Beach. Rather than get a new car, she renovated a derelict motel and turned it into a nice bed and breakfast with a restaurant on the downstairs floor. Pismo Beach is the Clam Capital of the World, or so they say, so Clara's signature dishes were clams fried in schmaltz and clams stewed in the Yemenite Zhug which Clara's aunt taught her to make. There was kugel and matzoh ball soup on the menu, a brisket sandwich, potato pancakes, a beef stew on Saturdays, home-cured pastrami, and corned beef around September, homebaked babka, chopped liver, blintzes around June, stuffed cabbage, beef sausages, a potato and spinach pastry which the migrant workers thought were empanadas, chocolate chip biscotti, honey cake in the fall, pickled herring, home fried doughnuts in the winter, a carrot yam stew with raisins and apricots around Thanksgiving. The Matzoh Ball soup was so popular that a number of people suggested that Clara should put some shellfish in it and turn it into a Boulliabaise, but Clara's personality was so forbidding that nobody would dare make the suggestion. Nevertheless, "Clara's" was a hit, and if it had nothing to do with the winningness of Clara's personality, it certainly had something to do with her daughter's.</span></div><div style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Clara never married again, and her daughter never saw so much as a man in her mother's life. But Denarius was the petite and exotic and funny waitress who served with a smile after school and before homework, who always took the orders right and remembered the name of every second-time customer. She was not beautiful in the way all the other swell girls in Pismo Beach were; she was a half-foot shorter, she had skin with a perpetual tan and a bumpy nose, she wouldn't wait for the fella to pull out the chair or hold the door, and never waited for the guy to tell her what she thought before telling him first. But the swell fellas in Pismo were crazy for her. Every one of them was a faithful customer after school, and every one of them probably asked her on a date multiple times, but she'd never say yes to any of them, and because she never said yes to any of them, they'd come back to Clara's twice as often to try to change her mind.</span></div><div style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">One guy never asked her out, so he, of course, became the one Denarius asked out. In 1955, he became Clara's son-in-law. Frederick Johansen, six-foot-four, All-American football lineman, decorated Korean War veteran, electrical engineer, man of five-hundred words a day, and former Lutheran acolyte. Certainly not good enough for her daughter, but good enough for America.</span></div><div style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Los Angeles relations refused to come to the wedding, refused to send a gift, and refused to speak to Clara for more than fifteen years. Until '55, Clara would come down every year to Los Angeles for the High Holidays and the Seders; she went to every Bar Mitzvah, every wedding, every bris. Occasionally Denarius would accompany her, but usually not. Denarius barely had half a dozen conversations with any of them as a child. Who the hell knows if these relatives ever went to shul if there wasn't a high holiday or a simcha involved? But even if they didn't, to marry a shegetz among cultural Jews is tantamount to declaring allegiance to Hitler; it is and will always be an excomunnicable offense that breaks families apart forever because it's the argument leads down the rabbit hole of theology's most important and unresolvable question: Is faith motivated by love, or is love motivated by faith?</span></div><div style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In our modern era when tolerance has finally won a few battles over faith, the question of intermarriage becomes still more vital. When the world shows signs of growing more tolerant, what need is there to uphold the groups and struggles of old? Every intermarriage, be it Jew to Gentile, Black to White, Liberal to Conservative, Lamb to Lion, is a rejection of old polarities - a declaration that all the great struggles which your ancestors underwent were absolutely unnecessary, irrelevant to the present, and deserve to be sucked into a black hole of forgetfulness. Memory can be as much a curse as a blessing, and surely many memories deserve to be forgotten. But in the modern era, when we so often seem on the precipice of a finer new world in which differences can finally be reconciled, perhaps all that stops us from realizing a world that's at least closer to this finer new world is the fearful memory of the world as it once was and threatens to be again. However, because we cannot erase these memories, perhaps these memories are precisely what dooms us to never achieve a world of greater tolerance.</span></div><div style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It was within a month of the wedding that Clara unexpectedly took up Fred's parents invitation to visit their church. In her nearly twenty years in Pismo Beach, the local legend Claradonna Zweig was never seen to socialize with anyone, and Fred's parents only invited her out of politeness. Yet by the end of 1955, she was a regular attendee to St. John’s Lutheran Church in Pismo Beach who insisted upon catering the Sunday lunches free of charge. On Good Friday 1956, she took baptism and never missed a Sunday thereafter for her remaining twenty-eight years.</span></div><div style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Clara’s was closed every Sunday thereafter, and after Church, Claradonna Helena Zweig would return home with a friend from her congregation, Sieglinde Schafer, a widow from Breslau whose husband, a promising Captain in Germany’s Eighth Army, was felled by a hail of bullets but two months after they were married in June 1914. Hauptmann Schulz was one of the 12,000 fallen Germans at the Battle of Tannenberg, whose legendary acts of bravery enabled the slaughter of 170,000 Russians. Sieglinde was roughly ten years older than Clara. She’d found her way to Pismo Beach with her father in roughly 1920, after the German riots against the Polish, who would eventually transform Breslau into Wroclaw, burned down her extremely German father’s medical offices. Who knows how they ended up in Pismo Beach, but Dr. Schafer died in his sleep in 1938, an eloquent and celebrated member of the Central Californian Bund whose funeral at St. John’s Lutheran was attended by hundreds of German-Americans and Klansmen alike. He was eminent throughout the state, perhaps even the Western United States, for his many kind words and trenchant insights about the great strength of new German regime. Every Bund organization from Montana to New Mexico would engage him to speak as an expert on German politics. &nbsp;&nbsp;</span></div><div style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And so every Sunday in the nineteen-sixties and seventies, Clara and Sieglinde would go after church to Clara’s modest apartment over the restaurant. They’d sing all the songs of gymnasium days, they’d play four-hand duets on Clara’s out of tune upright, they’d recite all the Goethe and Heine forced upon their memories by rote, they’d talk disapprovingly of the other church members, and they’d recall friends and husbands long dead. </span></div><div style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Clara’s daughter found Sieglinde Schafer a bit icky, and was certain Ms. Schafer was antisemite, but she was happy that her mother finally made a friend when all she’d ever seen from her mother was work and sacrifice and testiness. She had an older friend of her own not unlike Sieglinde, who could remind her of whom she truly was. </span><br /><br /><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Clara’s daughter, whom I suppose fancied herself all American, found Sieglinde Schafer rather icky, and was certain Ms. Schafer was antisemite like her father, but she was happy that her mother finally made a friend when all she’d ever seen from her mother was work and sacrifice and testiness. Even so, her mother's turn toward a new religion proved too much for her. </span><br /><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">St. John's installed a new Pastor right before Christmas 1965. A smiling blond from Montana who sported a flattop haircut and bolo ties every Sunday. On Good Friday '66, the tenth anniversary of Clara's baptism, he shocked the congregation by mounting the pulpit with a guitar in his hand. Younger members were overjoyed, they stood up and clapped excitedly while putting their arms in the air as though second nature. Clara and Sieglinde, on the other hand, were incensed and immediately petitioned the board for his firing. But no one on the board objected, they loved Pastor Lehmann, so that was the last which either Clara or Sieglinde made about the issue. For the next twenty years, they simply sat in the back pew and scowled. </span><br /><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Much less objectionable to Steve's grandmother was Pastor Lehmann's fundraisers for Reagan and Nixon, his preemptive encouragement of student deacons to volunteer for the Vietnam War, his public shaming of a lax daughter who asked a question about the War's justice. Clara had never been a political sort, instructing her daughter from the earliest age that political questions are what tear people apart from each other and can only interfere with people trying to go about their lives. But Clara's daughter began to notice the inveighs that Clara now seemed to be parroting from her Church about ungrateful students who protested against this great country of ours, and the ungrateful negroes who dare compare the way good Christians in the South treat their black people to the way godless Communists treat their billions of unfree citizens. The day that Fred offhandedly compared the segregationists to Nazis was the day he ended up with a bowl of Matzoh Ball soup dumped on his head. </span><br /><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">That last point about the ungratefulness of negroes was the one that Clara's daughter found truly inconceivable. How could Clara call negroes ungrateful when she owed so much her triumph in America to a negro woman? Neither Clara nor her daughter were the sole progenitors of 'Clara's success. The third, and perhaps most consequential, in their trinity of unexpected prosperity was Mrs. Washington, the kindly lady from Clayton County in Georgia whose husband drove her to work every day from Grover Beach </span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">at four in the morning in their beat up Plymouth Valiant before he went back home to get their four children ready for school and then drive fifty miles east to his job as a farmhand and then return at ten to pick Mrs. Washington up. The kindly lady who </span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">went every Sunday to sing in the church choir at Bethel Baptist, and catered their after-service lunches every week with 'Clara's leftover provisions from the week's food supply. When Clara herself became a Christian, she immediately informed Mrs. Washington that she no longer had access to the leftovers to cater her church because Clara would now use them to cater lunches at her own church. </span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Mrs. Washington was the kind of woman who would always sneak Clara's daughter a cookie, sometimes two or three, whenever Clara was too busy manning the stove or the cash register to look up. Running a business takes all kinds of people, and you need a boss who can kill with kindness as much as you need a boss who delights in killing. </span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Mrs. Washington was, begrudgingly, one of Clara's first hires. Clara thought that colored help, even if they worked in the kitchen, would drive customers away, but she needed the help immediately. Nobody knew who Clara was, and Clara had no idea how to get more applicants attention. The men were in the theaters of war, and their wives were almost fully employed in the factories. If Clara's was going to be a success, they needed all the help they could get. But Mrs. Washington had been waiting tables since she was an eight-year-old kid in Georgia. Clara had no idea how to take inventory, how to fill staffing needs, how to </span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">quickly </span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">update menus, and how to advertise. It was certainly not Clara who came up with the phone book advertisement in 1945: "Clara's: Home Cooking from the Jewish Mom You Never Knew You Needed," Every time a waitress broke down in tears from the stress of dealing with a customer, or from dealing with Clara, Mrs. Washington was always there with a hug and tissue. Every time a health department inspector or a supplier needed to be supplicated, it was Mrs. Washington, not Clara, who'd handle the negotiation. Every time a customer was in the hospital, Mrs. Washington would visit with a dinner tray taken without Clara's knowledge and some good cheer. Clara was an institution in Pismo Beach, but Mrs. Washington was the reason every customer over the age of 30 came back. </span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">And yet for almost twenty-five years, she never took her meal anywhere but in the kitchen. </span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">In 1966, an increasingly infirm Clara accidentally spilled a </span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">boiling</span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"> pot of Matzoh Ball soup on Mrs. Washington while she was mopping the kitchen floor. The skin on Mrs. Washington's limbs was forever disfigured thereafter, and she never properly walked again. Clara claimed to her daughter that it was the wet floor from the mop that made her slip, but her daughter always suspected that Clara, in her sixties and showing every year of it on her once waif-like and now witch-like frame, was already nowhere near as strong or coordinated as she once was.</span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Perhaps Clara used the accident to explain an infirmity caused by the simple accumulation of years and cares. Clara was untouched by the scald of the soup, but she claimed that her arms and knees were bruised from the fall and was never the same thereafter. She also claimed to have a nagging pain in her right shoulder where the pot fell on her. She claimed that she sympathized with Mrs. Washington for how badly she was hurt by the fall, but perhaps she used her own pain to absolve herself of guilt.</span><br /><br /><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Clara told Mr. Washington that his wife deserved whatever Clara could possibly give her, but that Clara couldn't give her much. Secretly, Clara always thought she'd paid Mrs. Washington far too much, and occasionally suspected Mrs. Washington of occasionally skimming from the cash register. She carefully explained to Mr. Washington that she couldn't possibly pay them anything more than something minimal when Mrs. Washington could no longer work? The hale and healthy Mr. Washington, perfectly slender, grey at the temples and the mustache, with eyes that bore into interlocutors with all too much understanding, nodded </span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">silently and sagely as he stood in front of Clara's paltry explanation; not so much as a word in response after the hello,</span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"> and when she was finished, he walked out of the restaurant without saying so much as a goodbye. Clara promised the Washingtons a dollar twenty five a week for the rest of Mrs. Washington's life - a minimum wage for an employee who maximized Clara's life. She sent it in the mail every week until she died, but never got any confirmation that the Washingtons received it. </span></div><div style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Denarius Zweig had never ridden a horse before meeting Annie-Jane Ivers, she’d never shot a gun, never played a hand of poker, never lit a fire, never slept under the open sky, never smoked a cigar or a joint, never skinned a deer. The boys all wondered where Clara’s daughter went when she wasn’t waiting tables, the answer was to let Annie-Jane Ivers show her the dank and steam and slit of the natural world. </span></div><div style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Annie-Jane Ivers ran away from her father’s house in 1919, when she was only eleven - her mother perpetually bruised, her independence perpetually violated, her sister perpetually defeated. One month later, she became a permanent worker at Monsieur Marchand’s French Boarding House named Coquette. By fifteen, "Coquette" was the Madame. By seventeen, she was turned into to the street for asking that her older peers get better pay and treatment. Mr. Marchand explained that it was not because she asked once, but that she heard his explanation, yet insisted upon asking twice. </span></div><div style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Over the next twenty years, Annie-Jane worked as a bandit, a banker, a blacksmith, a butcher, a bounty hunter, a cardshark, a cowherd, a deputy, a gold miner, a gunslinger, a homesteader, a marshal, a medicine showman, a missionary, a preacher, a railroad laborer, a rancher, a rustler, a schoolmarm, a shopkeeper, a snake oil salesman. No coquette she. You work overtime to survive, or survival works you over. </span></div><div style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">1948, forty years old, five-feet ten, her hair a bluish silver, her shoulders broad and hands as calloused as any laborer in America, her face wizened by crow’s feet and laugh lines and four packs a day, her skin prunishly bronzed like a person who hadn’t been indoors in a quarter of a century, her eyes with the mischievously rapid movements of a woman hard to impress and easy to amuse, she walks into Clara’s and after ten minutes, Denarius gets her to order the cheese blintzes. Annie-Jane likes them so much that she comes back for the cheese blintzes eight nights in a row. Denarius tries to get her to order something else: the babka, the bialy, the borscht, the brisket, the bulbitchki, but no, she wants more cheese blintzes. </span></div><div style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">With Annie-Jane’s barmaid humor and her scullery maid’s crudity, Clara’s daughter had never known it was possible to laugh like that. Clara did not approve of Annie-Jane’s loud ostentation, and warned her daughter not to get too friendly with this woman, but she couldn’t exactly tell a customer not to come who stayed for five hours at a time and ordered fifty dollars worth of blintzes every day. </span></div><div style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In 1949, Annie-Jane acquires a hundred acre horsefarm. She invites both of the Zweigs to come out and see it. Clara, of course, says no for both her and her daughter. Her daughter, of course, calls Annie-Jane up and says that she’s going to come out there without her mother’s knowledge. The next day, she asks Fred Johansen out on a date next Saturday, on Sunday, she tells Clara that the date went so well that they’re going to have a second date that day. Clara doesn’t approve of her daughter moving so fast, but better to be with Fred Johansen than with that freienfrau. </span></div><div style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The next day, Clara’s daughter rides a horse, shoots a deer, smokes a cigar, plays poker. Fred Johansen pecked her on the cheek yesterday, but when it’s time to say goodbye until the plans they made next week, Annie-Jane Ivers bends her backwards over her knee and gives Clara’s daughter a realization she can never unrealize. </span></div><div style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Saturdays with Fred and Steve, Sundays with Annie-Jane. That’s how it was most weekends for eighteen years. When Denarius needed an excuse to start spending nights under the stars of Ivers Farms, she tells Fred they’re getting married. Seven weeks later, they declare their love before God under His watchful nave at St. John’s Lutheran. Within five years, the&nbsp;Saturday mornings and afternoons are entirely Steve’s, the Saturday nights and Sundays are entirely Annie Jane’s. Fred simply goes into the garage with his short-wave radio and tunes up his Chevy. </span><br /><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The farmhands give enormous respect to Denarius, never making so much as a pass or flirt, and give her the nickname 'Denarius' because she always rode a black horse. She didn't understand the nickname, but she loved it all the same. Nearly two decades of blissful Sundays, sleeping next to Annie-Jane in fields of open California pampus, awoken by American goldfinches and Savannah sparrows, vigilantly ready for the dawn to welcome another Sunday of riding and hunting with a sunstroked and windswept face which, for eighteen years, Fred never asked once how she acquired. </span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Sometime around Memorial Day 1967, Denarius returns to Clara's for work on Monday, not windswept but ashen. The only person with little enough tact to ask her what's wrong is Steve, who gets the first of many an earful from his mother. </span></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Steve never got the full story of what happened to Auntie-Jane except what he read thirty years later on microfilm - which was that the legendary Annie-Jane Ivers was found on a small minority of Pine Flat Lake's shoreline that wasn't on her property. Her wrists had been bruised from shackles and her legs chained to a weight that the coroner said had clearly fallen off. He also indicated the presence of multiple barbituates in her system that he speculated were ingested by dissolving in strong alcohol. </span></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">One find and simple day in the early summer when he was eating some Matzoh Ball soup, a drunken hand from the horse farm showed up and started screaming some variation that only imprinted itself within his seven-year-old brain as 'YOU DID IT! IT WAS YOU!' while waving a gun at screaming customers while Clara sobbed unreservedly. Denarius emerges thirty seconds later from the back with a rifle, loaded and cocked, and tells the farmhand they'll talk outside. The conversation from the window was animated, but the guy never showed his face around Steve's Mom again. </span></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">What happened was probably as simple as Annie-Jane growing sick after twenty years of Denarius living her weekday life as a devoted daughter to a repressed Jesus freak and devoted wife to a beach bum drip, and who knows what a person as hard-scrabble as Annie-Jane Ivers would have done to complete an objective denied for twenty years? As Steve read the microfilm, he began to remember Auntie Jane showing up at inopportune moments like when the family was at a Howard Johnson's, which would prompt an animated discussion twenty feet from the table, or showing up unannounced at their Pismo house, sometimes appearing from some distance in the window. Steve remembered thinking it was very strange when her mother ordered Auntie Jane out of the diner, "I just want to eat here. Remember when that was normal?" she'd say. Until then, Steve had never seen Auntie-Jane in the diner himself, but he thought it as odd as Auntie Jane that she was being ordered out. </span></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">It was at a fourth of July party with the Johanssen clan that Clara’s daughter decided to do something which surprised the hell out of everybody, particularly Fred. Steve was seven years old, and she decided he needed to go to Hebrew school. “But why?” Fred asked, not in frustration but in bewilderment. “Why does anybody need a Hebrew education in Pismo Beach?”</span></div><div style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“That’s the problem. We have to leave Pismo.” </span></div><div style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And just like that, they moved. Fred Johansen was the type that always got along. His entire family was in Pismo more than a hundred years earlier. Dozens of births and deaths and baptisms and confirmations, decades of toil and sacrifice and simmering family resentments that were worked through by the thousands upon thousands of little bonds of love that keep a family together through their worst periods to the moments that all families cherish - the holiday dinners, the birthday parties, the lazy afternoons on the beach, the relaxed Sunday barbecues, the drunken nights out that occasionally ended in throwing a punch or two, but always made up for the next day, the grass they smoked in the back yard. Yet it never occurred to Fred, or to any other Johansen, that such bonds had to work to be maintained, or could strain under the pressure of longer distance. </span></div><div style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Whether or not those bonds strained, Fred kept his feelings to himself as he always did, and but for perhaps an extra whiskey before bed or a doobie after everybody was asleep, he was the same quiet picture of smiling amiability in middle age that he was when his wife forcefed him matzoh ball soup for the first time. If he disliked it, he kept it to himself, and sipped on matzoh ball soup at least once a week for the rest of his life. </span></div><div style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So in 1967, Steve found a new job as an electrical engineer in LA, and the Johansens moved to the big city. Steve went to public school in Fairfax, and his mother, in truly theatrical Hollywood fashion, got a Bas Mitzvah at the closest Reform Temple, Beth Hoveh, and while she only knew a couple college acquaintances in LA, she made sure to turn the Bas Mitzvah into an event. She sent laminated invitations to every member of the Beth Hoveh and to all her estranged relatives. Worried that these relatives might disapprove of a woman being called to the Torah, she kept calling their houses, talking their ears off for forty-five minutes at a time with whatever subject she could think up, and boaring her way into renewed ties and friendship with them until she was sure they’d relent and RSVP ‘Yes.’ The reception was not held at the synagogue, but at Nate n’Al’s Deli in Beverly Hills, near where her relatives lived so they'd have to show up. </span></div><div style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Fred wasn’t the type who thought much about money. He didn’t spend much, and there wasn’t much he wanted to spend. As far as luxuries went, he had a small boat he built himself, a couple rifles for hunting and a fishing pole, a wet bar in his basement, the 1952 Chevy 3100 pickup that he drove and repaired himself for forty years, the guitar he learned to play in the army and the zither his grandfather, Olaf Erikssen, taught him to play as a child. Any luxury more grandiose than their slightly larger than average 3 bedroom house would not have occurred to him to buy. </span></div><div style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">But from the moment they were married in 1955, Fred’s wife made sure that every cent not devoted to home or car maintenance was tied up in Treasury Bonds and stocks: GE, GM, Coke, Chrysler, the Seven Sister oil companies, Conoco Energy, Boeing, Campbell Soup, Kellogg, IBM, Whirlpool, Proctor and Gamble, Detroit Steel, Studebaker, Collins Radio, National Sugar Refining, Zenith Electronics… Some of these investments went bad, but of course, most of them paid off in spectacular fashion. All you had to do was buy the stock, not touch it for forty years, and you’d have enough money to feed a hundred generations of hearty Johansen folk who wouldn’t have to ever work again. If Fred ever realized that he was a multi-millionaire, he never gave much indication. Steve didn’t realize it either until his mother died and her will left him 18 million dollars in liquid assets. </span></div><div style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">From the moment Steve turned seven in 1967, his mother watched his grades like a hawk; gave him extra math problems over meals, schlepped him across town for violin lessons, and bought him books with no subtle pressure that he should read, signed him up for every extra-curricular, occupied his empty moments with chores around the house. </span></div><div style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Every Saturday from the move until Steve was thirteen, the two of them would go every Saturday to whatever movies were playing at the Chinese Theater. Different movies played there every week, usually in double features, from cartoons to subtitled foreign films. No matter how adult or violent, no matter how risque, no matter how intellectually challenging or B-movie dumb, the ritual was inviolate. Steve and his Mom would sit through it together. It was their ‘thing’, a way that Steve’s Mom could show that she trusted him, and perhaps an unspoken apology for driving him so hard. </span></div><div style="font-size: 14px;"><br /></div><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><div style="color: black; font-size: medium;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Steve eventually had to become a teenager like all teenagers, and became too old to regularly get caught with his Mom every Saturday. Sometimes they’d go, but Steve would usually try to get out of it. By the Saturday of Steve's Bar Mitzvah, their movies became just another chore his mother pressured him to complete. </span></div><div style="color: black; font-size: medium;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Pressure was Denarius's adult life: yelling at Steve and Fred, complaining about them to cousins whom she knew tolerated her rather than liked her, loafing around a house with the soaps on television in the background while her husband was at work until he returned home to find meals on the table that were a pale shadow of what either of their mothers could offer when they visited Pismo. The weekend smoking habit of Ivers Farms became a two-pack a day habit in Los Angeles, and Steve would complain endlessly about how the house would wreak and show his mother every newspaper article he found about how cigarettes can kill. His mother would simply shrug, and on this issue would ask for the privacy she never gave Steve, and Steve knew better than to ever point out the hypocrisy. </span></div><div style="color: black; font-size: medium;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">When Steve got a girlfriend in Junior High, she banned the girl from their house and staked out near the girl's house in case Steve went over there. They had to meet in secret, but Lisa tired of the sneaking around and eventually went with the running back of Jr. High football team, Mike Johnson. When high school came around and Steve was a lanky six-foot nerd with aviator glasses and a too large nose, and in any event kept too busy by extracurriculars for romance, his mother would question him pointedly about why he didn't have a girlfriend and what he could do to make himself more attractive to women. </span></div><div style="color: black; font-size: medium;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The first true explosion between Steve and Denarius had to wait until Steve was eighteen, when Steve's Mom insisted that he not major in the film school and get a practical major that could prepare him for work. "You knew that I wanted to go to the film school and you let me apply there so I would stay close to home. Now you tell me I can't go. You just want to keep running my life!" he said in a rare moment of drama and assertion against his mother that ended with the punctuation of a slammed door to his room, a Hollywood-like gesture</span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"> unseen before or since in the Johanssen household</span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">. This all-too-rare moment of assertion from Steve was perceptive, more perceptive than Denarius would have guessed, but long experience taught him his mother's motives all too well. Of course this was precisely her motive, and she didn't see what was wrong with it. Parents are there to guide their children. Children are a reflection of their parents achievements, and one day Steve's children will be a reflection of him. Denarius didn't want Steve to turn out a wild animal like Annie-Jane or a slacker like his father or a farbissineh like her mother; she knew how to give Steve the easiest, most pleasant possible life, and if there was a little unpleasantness along the way, he'll eventually see that what she did was for his own good. Children may disagree with the means, but they'll thank you in the end. So she did her best to shrug and laugh during the week before college, when Steve locked himself in his room and never came out. Of course, he did come out, he snuck out through his window to get dinner at McDonalds, and of course Denarius noticed, but against her better judgement, she took Fred's rare piece of advise to let him go. </span></div><div style="color: black; font-size: medium;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Denarius was not impressed with Carmen. She was as impressed as anyone else with the stunning beauty that now hung around the Johanssen household, but Steve kept telling his mother how brilliant his fiance was, yet Denarius never saw the brilliance for herself. Carmen was quiet, she dressed a little trashy, she was helpful when it came to serving and doing the dishes, and Denarius was grateful for that, even if she didn't think much of the condition in which Carmen left what she washed. When she heard Carmen play the piano, she was vaguely impressed, but she attributed the wrong notes to a lack of practice and work ethic that was in fact due to neurological trauma. </span></span></div><div style="color: black; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Steve dared not tell his mother the truth of Carmen's condition until after they married and she was pregnant with Clarissa - knowing that his mother would accuse him of throwing away his future for a woman with such serious impairments, and no doubt would inveigh that Carmen brought these conditions upon herself due to her innate sluttishness. </span></span></div><div style="color: black; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">But Steve's mother was in fact more understanding of it than he thought she would be. Burying her head in her hands and offering immediately to pay for any surgeries - the kind of debt which Steve would do anything to avoid. She explained, quite matter of factly, that had she known she would have advised him against the marriage in no uncertain terms and instantly knew that that was why Steve waited to tell her, but Carmen is now one of us and we have to take care of each other. </span></span></div><div style="color: black; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">For years thereafter, Steve waited for his mother's explosion on Carmen which never came. His mother exploded plenty, </span></span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">but instead of using his marriage to Carmen as an example of his irresponsibility, Denarius would inevitably take Carmen's side - or at least what she thought to be Carmen's side:</span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"> when Steve embarked on his video store venture, "You have an unwell wife to take care of and you're going off to run a business that everybody knows will be a flop???" When Steve had a second daughter, she exploded again, not even because of his recent eviction but because "You're going to subject an orthopedically challenged wife to another pregnancy???"</span></div><div style="color: black; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Denarius would note with alarm Carmen's every new slurring of speech, every slightly hesitant step, every sentence not finished, and would offer to come help around the house however often they needed. Steve and Carmen never took up Denarius's offer, but during the eighties she would show up unannounced for two evenings every week during which she'd insist on helping to straighten the house and cook dinner, and happily watched the grandchildren during those Saturday nights when Steve and Carmen went out with friends. During the eighties, she would occasionally try to get Steve and Carmen to come with the kids on Friday nights for Shabbos dinner, but they would inevitably leave after an hour-and-a-half, explaining to Steve's Mom that they had to get the kids to bed and the kids inevitably wake up in the car if they fall asleep first at her house. </span></div><div style="color: black; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Even when Steve's mother was at her most furious with him for his video store venture, she would call him most weekdays and talked to him for forty-five minutes. Steve would roll his eyes to his partner or the rare customer he had to handle, but he would always take the call and answered any questions she posed within the paragraphs of verbiage and shul gossip with an undertone of indulgent irony. </span></span></div><div style="color: black; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Fred, whose pot belly grew exponentially after the move to LA, died of a heart attack in the winter of '93, a few months from retirement and the whirlwind vacations Denarius had planned in her head for twenty years. About a month after he died came the LA riots, during which Denarius braved the whirlwind of violence and traffic to come directly and </span></span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">unannounced to</span><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"> Steve's house with a rifle and twenty pounds of dried goods to make sure that everybody was safe and well-fed. </span></span></div><div style="color: black; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span></div><div style="color: black; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">It was a ten minute drive from Fairfax to Hollywood. Steve loved living in Hollywood; he loved driving next to celebrities who had their convertible tops down, he loved living near the studio lots and thinking of the classics which were made in walking distance of his apartment. He loved watching the gorgeous nobody starlets who might one day be Michelle Pfeiffer or Nicole Kidman bring him his lunch order in the afternoon, and his drink order at night, and his coffee in the morning. He loved watching the idiot producers loudly run up their huge bar tabs and fantasize about how much better he could do their jobs than they do. A few times, he spotted 'The' Producer across a restaurant or bar, and wondered if The Producer knew who he was, but The Producer never seemed to recognize him in kind. He wondered if it was irresponsible to keep Carmen living in a Hollywood rancher when The Producer was walking the same streets they did and could find Carmen simply by looking in the phonebook. In what position would Carmen find herself then? But Carmen never mentioned it and never complained, so Steve never asked if she was alright with it.</span></span></div><div style="color: black; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span></div><div style="color: black; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">The ultimate luxury life could afford him was not to be Steven Spielberg or Steven Bochco, but Steve Johansson was a prosperous businessman, well-respected boss, husband to a beautiful wife, father to precociously smart daughters, a man whom people finally looked at with respect. Who would ever look at Steve with respect if they ever saw how his mother could barge in at any moment and tell him everything he was doing wrong? Steve Johansson, proprietor of the best life in Los Angeles, still a four year old boy whose mother runs his life. </span></span></div><div style="color: black; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span></div><div style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Like all Southern Californians of certain generations who needed to convince themselves of their own success, he felt the need to get out of LA proper and move into the San Fernando Valley - with a gate for his six-bedroom house, a Porsche for him and an Acura for her, private schools and private tutors for the kids when they're not being attended to by a live-in nanny, maids to clean up so his wife wouldn't have to, nice restaurants to feed them dinner a couple times a week, crummy restaurants to order in on the other nights, and caterers to come over when they had company. Shopping</span></span><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"> for the depressed, yoga for the anxious, weed for the apathetic, beaches nearby to calm everybody down. The food is always served in plentiful portions for the powerful men who overeat, and just as plentiful are the part time modeling contracts for their expensively dressed daughters who have bulimia. </span><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Clothes shopping, jewelry shopping, manicures and spas, overpriced wines from Napa and oversweet mixed drinks from the 18 year old behind the bar, five hours for power lunches and six hours for champagne brunch. </span></div><div style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div><div style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">And it was Steve's moment to become all of that. </span></span></div></div><div class="_524d" style="font-size: 14px;"></div></div></div></div></div></form></div></div>Evan Tuckerhttps://plus.google.com/101333496816879280258noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5120202207964289878.post-4818543885184964612016-11-02T18:49:00.001-04:002016-11-02T18:49:33.951-04:00What Happens in America's Darkest Timeline<div style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin-bottom: 6px;">Brief walkthrough of America's darkest timeline scenario - which will probably not happen. There are roughly 300 million privately held guns in this country, not including guns among police or armed forces. I guarantee that the vast majority of them are owned by people supporting Trump, and a large plurality owned by Trump supporters of particular passion. At any point, Trump, if denied his will as either a President or thwarted candidate, can call on his followers to rise up<span class="text_exposed_show" style="display: inline;">&nbsp;and defend the country from thrwarting the will of the people - and as every tyrant believes, he believes that he IS the people, and therefore his will is the will of America.</span></div><div class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; display: inline; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;"><div style="margin-bottom: 6px;">Furthermore, both the armed forces and the police have vast quantities of members, heavily armed members, who will believe that anything Trump is denied is an act of war on the American people, and will therefore respond, like Trump's potential citizen army, by declaring war on the American people. The Army and Police will be significantly divided, therein will begin a civil war. Not a civil war fought by two neat sides as in Lincoln's era, but a chaotic civil war that makes no street corner in America safe, and perhaps no street corner in Mexico or certain parts of Canada either. An entire continent can turn into Syria.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 6px; margin-top: 6px;">There is a more than good chance that any variation of this will not happen any time soon, but a lighter version of this, hopefully a significantly lighter one, is coming sometime in the 50 years. You can take that to whatever vulture capitalist bank at which you deposit. The point of sharing this is simply to scare the living shit out of you all and make you realize what might be at stake. When you're not having a nervous breakdown, vote, knock on doors, sign up to phonebanks to call people and convince them and remind them to get out the vote, and if you have time: go to battleground states to knock on doors and, whatever you do for the election this week, be prepared for significant hostility for your contribution. Be vigilant. Democracy itself is on the ballot.</div></div>Evan Tuckerhttps://plus.google.com/101333496816879280258noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5120202207964289878.post-29638583002739054832016-11-02T00:02:00.000-04:002016-11-02T00:03:13.922-04:00Ran - Again<br /><div class="_3x-2" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;"><div data-ft="{&quot;tn&quot;:&quot;H&quot;}"><div class="mtm" style="margin-top: 10px;"><div class="_6m2 _1zpr clearfix _dcs _4_w4 _5cwb" data-ft="{&quot;tn&quot;:&quot;H&quot;}" id="u_ib_3" style="background-color: white; box-shadow: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.14902) 0px 0px 0px 1px inset, rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.0980392) 0px 1px 4px; max-width: none; overflow: hidden; position: relative; z-index: 0; zoom: 1;"><div class="clearfix _2r3x" style="zoom: 1;"><div class="lfloat _ohe" style="float: left;"><span class="_3m6-"></span><br /><div class="_6ks" data-ft="{&quot;tn&quot;:&quot;F&quot;}" style="line-height: 0; position: relative; z-index: 1;"><div id="u_ib_4"><span class="_3m6-"><a ajaxify="/ajax/flash/expand_inline.php?max_width=487&amp;selector=%5E._6m2&amp;target_div=u_ib_4&amp;share_id=611648315545248&amp;user_share_id=10101476079456805" aria-label="Ran" class="_6kt _6l- __c_" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FI7EjGc8W1w" rel="nofollow async" style="color: #365899; cursor: pointer; display: block; position: relative; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"></a></span></div></div><span class="_3m6-"></span></div></div></div></div></div></div><br /><div class="_5pbx userContent" data-ft="{&quot;tn&quot;:&quot;K&quot;}" id="js_sn" style="background-color: white; line-height: 1.38; orphans: 2; overflow: hidden; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; widows: 2;"><div class="text_exposed_root text_exposed" id="id_581964f377d8a1a17606274" style="display: inline;"><div style="display: block; margin: 0px 0px 6px;"><span style="color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;helvetica&quot; , &quot;arial&quot; , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/FI7EjGc8W1w" width="560"></iframe></span></span></div><div style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: #1d2129; display: block; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0px 0px 6px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><br /></div><div style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: #1d2129; display: block; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0px 0px 6px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">This movie is suddenly running through my head. Ran is the Japanese word for Chaos. It's a samurai epic based upon King Lear, in which a cruel king spends fifty years conquering his land and uniting it, only for the land to come utterly undone in his old age. It's impossible to see the movie and not think of Imperial Japan, the suffering it inflicts on others viciously inflicted upon itself, and yet the country who inflicted the retributive suffering on Japan has suffered onl<span class="text_exposed_show" style="display: inline;">y mildly in comparison. As far as empires go, the American Empire was far, far from the worst. Even if you don't have family from other empires, pile after pile of miserable reading about it is a library card away. We have not paid yet in blood for our sins since the Civil War. War is murder, the world is what it is, and good people do what they can to conduct themselves with honor, but goodness is only relative in war, and the iniquity of the fathers is visited upon the sons unto the third and fourth generation. Even were everything which the United States did in Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Saudi Arabia, Congo and Zaire, Indonesia (to say nothing of domestic crimes against American citizens), entirely justified, the violence would still be revisited upon us, because the world has no solutions, only problems. It should not be controversial to say that the KGB was much, much more ruthless than the CIA, to anyone who's read history seriously, that is undeniable. But what does that matter? It's also undeniable is that Russians have paid for their crimes many times over. Has any country ever been so overdue to pay for what they've done as we are?</span></div></div></div>Evan Tuckerhttps://plus.google.com/101333496816879280258noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5120202207964289878.post-19538720270490709362016-10-26T19:37:00.000-04:002016-10-26T22:00:13.983-04:00Review Dump 2 - non classical music edition<div><b>The Conversation - Charles Theater - September 19th</b><br /><b><br /></b>The Conversation, the immortal movie made by Francis Ford Coppola between his two immortal Godfather movies, is the essential Coppola movie for right now. The original Godfather was essential for the period when it was made and the world longed to return to traditional values of family and ethnicity, on the cusp of forgetting the authoritarianism made the first world divorce such values in the first place. The second Godfather was essential for the eighties and nineties, when the success of America was so enormous that in trying to liberate ourselves from fear and want, we'd become privation and terror we set out to defeat. Apocalypse Now was essential for the Bush era, when neo-imperial hubris made us strike out into unknown places and assume that we could assume such ventures with little sacrifice of and change to our essential natures and without the essential darkness and chaos of these dysfunctional parts of the world rubbing off on us.<br /><br />In the corporate world of Big Data, in the government world of Homeland Security, in the intelligence world of Putin and PRISM, The Conversation is a textbook lesson in how our own paranoia becomes self-fulfilling. Harry Kaul, being America's greatest expert in wiretapping, knew forty years before the rest of us how easily our privacy becomes compromised. We're all stuck in a world where it's possible for the entire world to know our secrets, and we have no idea to whom we're surrendering our privacy. Is it possible that some of them are in this to try to fight back against the people who'd exploit our lack of privacy, and should we ultimately let them, or do they then, like Michael Corleone, become as evil as the people from whom they wish to protect us? We have no idea how to answer these questions, and better perhaps than any other movie, The Conversation articulates this vague dread that follows us all throughout our days. It is essential viewing for any movie buff, any politically active person, anyone who's ever experienced their privacy has ever been compromised (which is probably all of us). So of course, hardly anybody these days has seen it.<br /><b><br /></b><b>Heaven Can Wait - Charles Revival - August 27th&nbsp;</b><br /><b><br /></b>It's often said that America's greatest contribution to world culture is the 'studio era,' the 'Golden Age of Hollywood,' the star system. Other countries do literature and theater, but we Americans do movies.<br /><br />But what remains so strange about the Studio Era is how utterly un-American it was. The movies were generally about high society types that dress immaculately and trade flirtatiously witty barbs that could at least as easily be found in London, Paris, or Vienna as on the Upper-East side of Manhattan. No doubt, there was a kind of wish-fulfillment to it - the wish of the unsophisticated and hard working American bourgeois to have the charmed lives of the European bourgeois - and in the days before FDR liberalism, to be bourgeois signified far more wealth and class and leisure than it did among later generations. The director upon which the very bedrock of high style Hollywood became known for is Ernst Lubitsch, who lived in Berlin until he was 30, and in so many ways, he never left Berlin.<br /><br />Heaven Can Wait is about a spoiled high society cad who barely ever works, seduces women whenever he can, and relies on his innate charm and good looks to get him through a charmed life and stay married to a saintly wife whom he knows he does not deserve. You don't expect that such a movie can stun you with its quality, and yet by the end it utterly does. It's a completely overlooked movie, even among Lubitsch's output, in which the many seasons of a man's life are portrayed with both humor and unflinching accountability for his flaws, even if the situations are sometimes rather implausible - this is Hollywood after all... I have no doubt that you could find men like this in many American cities, but the way they lived their whole lives were based on the many more society men who lived like this whom you could find in any European city.<br /><br />All the qualities we claim, or at least seem, to value in traditional Americans: industry, honesty, selflessness, are precisely the opposite of the qualities which Lubitsch and his followers valued. Sure, there were plenty of movies that advanced traditional American values from directors like John Ford and Frank Capra, but the vast majority of movies from Hollywood glorified the selfish, the idle, the liars, who charmed their way out of situations in precisely the manner Americans never did. <br /><b><br /></b><b>Othello - Chesapeake Shakespeare Company - September 24th</b></div><div><br /></div><div>I have a soft spot for Othello. It's odd to talk of one of the pinnacles of Western Literature as having a 'soft spot', you don't have soft spots for Othello, you have soft spots for 80's hair metal and reality television. And yet, when it's placed next to Hamlet, Lear, the Scottish Play, and the underrated Antony and Cleopatra, perhaps you have to talk about Othello as though it's something resembling a soft spot. It's perhaps the most magnificent flawed work ever conceived, with dry spots that even make Hamlet fly by. Obviously Hamlet and Lear have their own problems with bloat, but the problem of Othello is that it's basically two plays shoehorned into one. and yet perhaps I prefer Othello to even Hamlet or Macb*th. It is a stretch to say that you can be moved rather than thrilled or in awe by the respective Scot and Dane. But like Lear, Othello is a genuinely moving play.</div><div><br /></div><div>It's also very difficult to speak about Othello properly because contemporary politics dictates that Othello must be coopted for today's social justice agenda when Othello is hardly a play about race at its most fundamental level. In many ways, if Othello is a play about race, then it is a play about race the same way that The Merchant of Venice is about Judaism. Shakespeare probably does view Othello as an archetypal hot-blooded African who cannot control his moorishly animal instincts to jealousy and lust no matter how thoroughly he tries or how thoroughly he's considered by white society to have mastered them. And yet, whatever the truth of that matter, there is unmistakable sympathy for Othello's plight, and his tragedy is in some ways more meaningful because the stench of racism in how he's drawn is unmistakable. Shakespeare is large enough to contain all interpretations, and to place him within any one of them is to limit him.<br /><br />The greatest performance I've ever seen of Othello, perhaps the greatest performance I've ever seen of any Shakespeare play, is the 1980 BBC television rendering with Jonathan Miller in the directors chair while starring Anthony Hopkins as Othello, Penelope Wilton as Desdemona, and an absolutely immortal performance by Bob Hoskins as Iago that should be studied for hundreds of years as a textbook of how to interpret Shakespeare so that every potential character nuance registers. There are very, very, very few actors worthy of the Shakespearean parts they play, and perhaps no performance I've ever seen comes even close to the pure and infinitely sophisticated evil Hoskins accomplishes here.<br /><br /></div>I very nearly left a quarter of the way through this production because, like most American theater troops, the actors wreak such havoc on Shakespeare's language. It's not really an issue of being American, there are plenty of English and British actors who have terrible trouble with Shakespeare, though Shakespeare meaning as much as it does to the British, I'm sure they're spared the unperceptive murder of his verse and character we so often get here; but stage actors are not the most thoughtful bunch of people to begin with, and many of them have little ability to render the most intellectually thoughtful writer since whoever wrote The Bible in any meaningful way. Both Othello and Iago were utterly unworthy of the parts they played, and spoke their lines with a woodenness that tells you they might as well be appearing in a Broadway musical made from a movie as one of the cornerstones of human creativity.<br /><br />To leave would have been a shame, because it was the leading ladies who shone through in this production and forced Shakespeare's magic to take over when it's leading men stood thoroughly in The Bard's way. I do wish that there was a bit more of the shrinking violet in Diane Curley's thoroughly assertive portrayal of Desdemona, the sacrificial virgin element of Desdemona's character is unmistakable and part of her tragedy, and you could feel the actress recoiling against that element as though her inner monologue were saying "I'm not going to be just another 'Victim Desdemona.' And yet, it certainly worked, because the more assertive Desdemona is, the more 'justification' Othello has to meet her questioning with violence. Given the fact that her Othello was such a damp squib, it only served to help the energy of their scenes to see a Desdemona who would not take such treatment willingly.<br /><br />But the true star was Emilia, Brianna Mamente, who made her final scene into a truly magnificent display of defiance. In such a production you begin to wonder how the women of Shakespearean society could be so subordinate when they're so much more charismatic, more intelligent, more interesting than their male peers.<br /><br /><b>The Flower Queen - Yellow Sign Theater - October 24th</b><br /><br />There's an obvious conflict of interest here, because if my compositions are going have a 'star' in them for the foreseeable future, it's Ali Clendaniel. But the reason I've made her that is because if there are two better performers than she and her partner, Connor Kizer, I have yet to see or hear them.<br /><div><br /></div><div>This is Baltimore ultimate hipster power couple, and unlike the usual Baltimore hipsters who affect with such effort a pose that they don't give a fuck what you think in precisely that way that tells you they give many fucks indeed, these two are two of the only ones who convince me that they really don't. Most performers in local scenes exist in one dimension, they play it cool and flat, and put any of their minimal effort into appearing still more effortless than they really are. But these are two performers who throw themselves into all ten, spilling as much blood and guts and sweat into a minute of what they perform as many performers do in a decade.</div><div><br /></div><div>The best evidence of the above is probably Connor's band, The Creepers. The name alone should tell you everything you need to know. To front a band in which every song is from the point of view of a stalker in 2016, when the hipster set is scared to laugh at his or her own shadow for fear of giving offense and being thought insufficiently committed to social justice (and therefore uninvited from certain parties), is the mark of an artist with brass balls. Even if you don't think its funny - and I really, really do, all the moreso because some people seem to get so worked up when the band is mentioned - anybody in the arts should admire the courage to court that kind of controversy.&nbsp;</div><div><br /></div><div>The first time I heard Ali Clendaniel sing in her two-woman band, Nudie Suits, I was thoroughly amused. They were just starting out, and the music wasn't all that interesting yet, and yet here was a singer who was literally throwing in every vocal effect but the kitchen sink, seemingly prepared to fake an orgasm onstage to keep the audience listening. The second time I heard them, I was stunned at how much better they'd gotten in such a short period. The third time I heard them, I honestly wondered I was listening to someone summon some kind of daemon from the shadow of the deep. Ruby Fulton, manning the electronics and ever the perfect supporter in a hundred Baltimore bands that make the principal artist better than they ever were, found a way to harness the viscralness of Ali's performances so that there were seemingly twenty of her singing at once. I instantly knew I'd found the only person who could sing King David for my Psalms settings.&nbsp;</div><div><br /></div><div>So now that I've thoroughly kissed up to them. I have a strong feeling that I was not supposed to understand the first thing about what their play, The Flower Queen, was about, and I didn't. I would and probably will watch either of them in just about anything, but just about anything was pretty much a description of what we watched. I could not tell you a single thing about what the play was about, and Ali was stuck with not much to do, but Conor chewed up the stage like he was on a three-day-bender, and that alone was hilarious enough to merit anyone seeing the play. But I have the sense they don't much care what others think of what they do, me least of all, and that kind of courage of conviction alone is reason enough to follow their careers with interest. How many artists have the courage to simply do what they think is meaningful or funny and take us along for the ride? It's not a long list. Even when the artists misfire, you have to be grateful to be along for the ride.&nbsp;</div><div><br /></div><div><b>Academy Chamber Ensemble - Shriver Hall - October 24th</b></div><div><br /></div><div>OK. One classical review... No doubt, it's bad form to give a bad review to musicians from Academy of St. Martin in the Fields when their founder and guiding light, Sir Neville Marriner, just passed away after as rich a life in music as the world can bequeath, but here we are.&nbsp;</div><div><br /></div><div>Back in the day, Sir Neville, Snev, was a frequent guest conductor for the Baltimore Symphony, and when David Zinman left, rumor was afoot that the BSO courted him unsuccessfully. The truth is that Sir Neville was the perfect musician for the recording studio, where his natural good taste made for musicmaking that was always pretty and often bland. Never was there anything in Snev's musicmaking that could be construed as an ugly sound. A very fine musician Sir Neville certainly was, but culling through a thousand recordings to find ten revelations is a tall order to place for too little reward.</div><div><br /></div><div>The main work was the Schubert Octet. A beautiful and exhausting piece of music - exhausting no doubt to play, and exhausting to listen to unless the performers exhaust themselves. One can't fault touring performers for husbanding their resources through an hour-long tour de force that they probably have to repeat ten times in as many days, but any performance of a Schubert work of 'heavenly length' (Schumann's term for Schubert's hour-long excursions through sonata form) that does not demand our attention will not receive it. It was thoroughly well-played, thoroughly pretty, thoroughly tasteful, and thoroughly bland. As I snuck into the front row, spotting a rare open seat next to my grandmother, Shriver Hall's venerable 96-year-old front row institution who never misses a concert, I glanced to my right and spotted Evan Drachman a few seats over - a relatively famous local cellist who is the grandson of Gregor Piatagorsky - and he was there with what appeared to be his teenage son. His son looked even more bored than I was, and his father kept having to silently tell his son to stay calm, because there were still 40, 30, 20 minutes left in the piece.&nbsp;</div><div><br /></div><div><b>Book Rec: Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather</b><br /><b><br /></b>What we're missing from the American experience today is Willa Cather. I don't mean precisely that we need to read the writer more often as a magic palliative for our ills, though we could do much worse - she should be better appreciated even than contemporaries like Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner who are rated her betters; but what's currently missing from this country is the American experience which Willa Cather writes of in her books.<br /><br />Everything in America is now known. There are no new adventures, no new sights, no new necessities, nothing to discover or uncover. For the first time ever, we are an old country, adrift in too many memories, too little discovery, too much wealth, too little commitment, too much preservation, not enough construction of the new. <br /><br />My Antonia is perhaps a greater book, about the suffering and striving of Americans come to Nebraska, where the winter is as bitter as life, life is lived on the edge of death, and all that can keep a family, and a community, together is the common bonds of struggle. The suffering in Death Comes for the Archbishop is not quite so close at hand, it is about the experience of two foreign priests, come to the deserted Southwest to save souls, hear confessions, instruct catechisms, and loyalty to one another. A lesser writer would try to make something a bit more overtly homoerotic out of their friendship, just as has been made out of Willa Cather's life. But there is very little erotic at all in this book, if sex is mentioned at all, or even implied, it is in the context of the great suffering which some women undergo at the hands of husbands. The essence of this book, the essence of Cather, is not nearly so monomaniacal to reduce to anything bodily at all, it is pure compassion and Christian love.<br /><br />Cather is hardly unaware of the mixed motives of people. One of the two priests is clearly vain and arrogant, the other clearly fanatical and temperamental. And yet, their flawed motives are what spur them to rise to occasions of greater humanity. The privations they undergo, the suffering to which they minister, the bonds which they create with their communities, are the bonds that build a country. They are characters whom, through motives as flawed as they are pure (not as large a contradiction as it may seem), created communities where communities did not before exist. Cather is often talked of as a novelist of nostalgia, a conservative who bemoans a lost America. As time marches forward, the America lost is far more essential than mere nostalgia. From the view in 2016, the lost America she bemoans is an America that had hope and vision for its future.&nbsp;</div>Evan Tuckerhttps://plus.google.com/101333496816879280258noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5120202207964289878.post-66042539384818056292016-10-23T23:32:00.003-04:002016-10-26T22:10:00.128-04:00Review Dump 1<div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;">The least important thing I'm going to do in this space...</div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;"><b>October 1: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8OHbbmfnW8">The Marriage of Figaro</a> - Washington National Opera</b></div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;"><br /></div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;">I thought it started at 8, not 7. It was a completely traditional, thoroughly adequate, thoroughly delightful evening in the company of my favorite opera that I'll travel around the world to see if I have enough money. Fin.</div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;"><br /></div><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: &quot;arial&quot; , sans-serif;"><b>October 6: Simon Bolivar Symphony - Dudamel - Carnegie Hall</b></span><br /><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;"><b><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fg2i2NB-i3o">La Valse</a></b></div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;"><b><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Px2pF75bdIY">Rite of Spring</a></b></div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;"><b>Dance Mix</b></div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;"><br /></div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;">The first time I heard the Simon Bolivar Symphony, they were a youth orchestra, and quite frankly, they were better. This is not the place to get into the relative merits of El Sistema vs. the dysfunction of Venezuela. I don't know what it is that's lacking, the size of the ensemble is still overwhelming, but there is a conspicuous lack of women in their new incarnation. Does the lack of women deplete the frission the orchestra used to have? Whatever it is, the orchestra that used to be a conglomeration of 200 attractive men and women that played with their entire bodies is gradually becoming just another orchestra of jobbing musicians in their thirties who are disproportionately male for whom a concert is just another concert. That first time I heard the Bolivarians live, it was a Rite of Spring for the ages, played by the kinds of youthful, energetic people for whom the Rite of Spring is created. Dudamel's conception was roughly the same, but the weight of the orchestra - in the dead space that is the Kennedy Center concert hall no less, was astonishing. You didn't just hear their sound, you felt it - everything from the basses up to the highest flutes and trumpets registered not only in the bodies of the players, but in the bodies of the audience. In their Rite of Spring which opened the Carnegie Hall season, there was only just a small fraction of that frission.&nbsp;</div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;"><br /></div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;">Growing up among dance rhythms and the glorification of youth that is Latin American culture, the Bolivarians have a hotline to The Rite of Spring that many more refined orchestras lack. They do not, however, have a hotline into the upper class elegance and nostalgia necessary for a La Valse for the ages. It's something they will have to work towards over a period of decades. This was a fine performance, Dudamel, due to conduct the Vienna New Year's Concert for 2017, has a fine ear for the bends and byways of waltz rhythm, but it was still too mechanical - a generic Ravel piece rather than a macabre love letter to a culture killed by Big Bertha. It was followed by a hodgepodge of 'greatest hits' dance music from 'around the world' which contained few surprises. Hoedown... Trisch-Trasch Polka... Hungarian Dance #5... Ginasteria's Estancia... West Side Story Mambo. Excellently played of course as the Bolivarians always do dance music, but unbelievably awkward in the silence of how pieces which need no introduction were introduced one after the other with a spoken introduction in Dudamel's still quite halting English.&nbsp;</div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;"><br /></div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;">I believe in Gustavo Dudamel - he has not only not forgotten his roots in Venezuela, he has refused the hyper-prestige appointments which orchestras have no doubt thrown at him behind the scenes with little regard for whether he's ready - staying loyal to the musicians who brought him to eminence in a manner that contemporaries of his like Yannick-Nezet Seguin and Andris Nelsons were all too willing to ditch for more glamorous and prestigious places. In twenty years, I'm positive that Dudamel will be a Maestro for the ages. But in the meantime, the Simon Bolivar Symphony has to undergo the same growing pains that every musical ensemble must after the thrill of youth leaves and one struggles to find one's mature voice. So long as their core stays together with Gustavo Dudamel at the helm, they will reach the promised land of musical greatness.</div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;"><b>October 7: Simon Bolivar Symphony - Dudamel - Carnegie Hall</b></div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;"><b><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LaNoiKuJFQg">Bachianas Brasillieras #2</a></b></div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;"><b><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ujidkhv9vLY">Petrushka</a></b></div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;"><br /></div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;">THIS was more like it. Somehow, eighty-five odd years after its composition, this was the Carnegie Hall Premiere of Villa-Lobos Bachianas Brasillieras #2. There are all sorts of sleeping giants in the 20th century classical repertoire, with outputs large enough to equal Bach's, and probably similar in how it contains hundreds of treasures alongside hundreds of generic duds (my opinion of Bach's is not everybody's...) - Villa-Lobos, Martinu, Hindemith, Milhaud, Henze, Rautavaara, Penderecki - perhaps even known giants like Sibelius and Nielsen and Messiaen and Britten of whom the world still only skims the surface of their outputs. Even now, they lie in wait for performers and audiences to catch up to them and cull the wheat from the chafe - masterpiece after masterpiece seemingly content to collect dust until the world takes notice.&nbsp;</div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;"><br /></div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;">If Dudamel puts the weight of his prestige behind Villa Lobos the way Beecham did for Delius, it will be a career well-spent (better than Beecham's... and I LIKE Delius). Alongside a few more light-weight Latin Dances, this was a revelation from a still unexplored continent of music finally brought to life in a new hemisphere. The orchestra slimmed down to (relative) chamber size, and an orchestra that sounded tired the day before came to life with the excitement of new discovery. The Bolivarians are learning how to do new things.</div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;"><br /></div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;">What followed was a Petrushka that was 10x as charismatic as the day before's Rite. Dudamel is no master yet - he still sometimes, as in the Russian Dance, relies on fast tempos to provide the excitement that phrasing and color should take care of - and speed for speed's sake is rarely as exciting as it seems. But within this Petrushka was character galore - the contrabassoon's famous belch elicited an entire concert hall's worth of laughter. Every solo seemed to have an original bend of the phrase. This is the way to make music.&nbsp;</div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;"><br /></div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;"><b>October 8: Met - <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IdjFBW-S3z0">Tristan und Isolde</a> - Rattle/Stemme/Skelton/Pape</b></div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;"><br /></div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;">There are five conductors in my idiosyncratic personal pantheon for whom I will track down every performance of every vintage, and only one of them is living: Charles Munch, Dmitri Mitropoulos, Rafael Kubelik, Leonard Bernstein, and Simon Rattle. There is not a single performance in my experience from any of these five from which you can't learn something, and often something extraordinary. For other conductors, music is an autocracy. For these five, music is a democracy - seemingly no limits in the repertoire they choose, seemingly no limits in the new takes they'll find on old repertoire. Dictators like Szell and Dorati and Muti can thrill through their precision, philosopher kings like Furtwangler and Celibidache and Barenboim can engender awe through their loftiness. But these five do not rule, they are presidents, who proactively inspire their ensembles with inspiring ideas, and thereby inspire their orchestras to the same. In the cases of these five, the goal is neither to capture the spirit of the composer nor the recapturing a lost performance tradition nor the exploitation of music to make philosophic points. The goal is musicmaking that lives purely in the moment of its performance, a living document that is neither bound by the score or by previous performances.&nbsp;</div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;"><br /></div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;">Of course, such a conception of music should be generally alien to the music of its preeminent philosopher-autocrat, not that it stopped, or should have stopped them, Kubelik particularly was a Wagnerian of distinction whose performances have been preserved quite well. But if any music lives in the moment or sinks by the hour, it is the music of Richard Wagner. Wagner has to live and breathe, every phrase newly minted and originally conceived, or he dies. It should come as no secret then why so many music lovers find his operas moribund.&nbsp;</div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;"><br /></div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;">It is almost impossible to write about Wagner without aping his extreme length and bloat. One can't possibly do justice to the plethora of elements, particularly if one is not particularly passionate about Wagner. I personally find Wagner a great composer, a good dramatist, a bad poet and a horrible philosopher, and because Wagner's musical genius is hidebound by his ideas, his music dramas can be cripplingly dull indeed.</div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;"><br /></div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;">Tristan generally falls somewhere between the top to the middle of my interest in him - not as interesting to me as Die Meistersinger and parts of the Ring, but hundreds of times more interesting than Parsifal. Even so, there are moments in Tristan, whole quarter hours even, that are breathtaking and my life would be far poorer without. What a shame that the director, Marius Trelinsky I think, underlined them with the subtlety of a kid with a squirt gun. When Brangene interrupts Trisolde's love duet, and all that remains are two string lines intermingling in counterpoint with each other like the merging of two souls, Trelinsky closes the fucking curtain, as though we're too dumb to perceive the blissful oblivion for ourselves. When it's time for the Liebestod, Isolde is left on the stage alone with what one can only assume is a dead Tristan sitting on a bench after he's presumably bled to death from the wound (in this case a gunshot wound) given him by Melot.&nbsp;</div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;"><br /></div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;">One could hear boos for the staging during the applause, complaints in the audience ("Go back to Stuttgart" I heard a neighbor say). In truth, the staging was neither shocking nor pseudo-shocking in the manner of so much European opera. It was simply unsatisfying in a manner that neither helped to elucidate Wagner's philosophical ideas nor improved them.&nbsp;</div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;"><br /></div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;">Musically, what can one say? We were in the presence of Nina Stemme, the great Isolde of our era, Rene Pape, the great Bass of our era, and Simon Rattle, the great Maestro of our era (for me at least). If they can't provide a great Tristan, nobody can. It says a lot that Stuart Skelton, not a Tristan for the ages, did very little to embarrass himself. His voice was clearly extremely tired by Act III, but then again, Tristan is on the edge of death and madness, perhaps that's precisely what Wagner intended - his exhaustion only added depth to his scenes. Stemme was, of course, as close to perfect as the largest role in the soprano repertoire can allow. But if anything, her performance showed the limits of perfection. In this least perfect of all composers, perfection is the enemy. Wagner is nothing if not his own musical death cult - he demands that his lead singers give everything to him and risk their entire future career on every performance. A singer unwilling to do so may have a brighter future, but he or she is not a born Wagnerian.&nbsp;</div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;"><br /></div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;">It was ultimately Rattle's show of course, and Rattle nearly accomplished the impossible - to make the entirety of Tristan truly sing with an unending melody. It was not the plush and rectilinear Met Wagner of Levine or Leinsdorf, thank god, nor was it a Tristan much like any other Wagner conductor. It was a human scaled Tristan, I found myself thinking again and again 'this is how Giulini would have conducted it.' Rattle once said in an interview that he thought of Tristan as Schubert on steroids, and what emerged was an intimate music drama of extremely human dimensions. In this most artful of composers, Rattle fashioned something that felt nearly artless. The effortlessness with which the central love duet spun out was a thing of wonder, for once, Tristan und Isolde did not seem like two philosophical nodes upon which grandiloquence is hung, but two human beings, very much in love. Rattle is the one living conductor who can achieve what is in my view the most impossible task in music: he can make Wagner seem human.</div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;"><br /></div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;"><b>October 10: Philadelphia Orchestra - <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-My1Y2wJds">Mahler 6</a> - Rattle - Carnegie Hall</b></div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;"><br /></div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;"><div class="gmail-_5pbx gmail-userContent" id="gmail-js_75" style="color: #1d2129; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 1.38; overflow: hidden;"><div class="gmail-text_exposed_root gmail-text_exposed" id="gmail-id_580d71782e4192663619849" style="display: inline;">I thought I knew Mahler 6&nbsp;before this concert. I know nothing. It isn't simply a tragic symphony that might summon the ghosts of history or break your heart or excite your nerves, it is an awesome and terrifying daemon conjured from the ether. That's the only thing I can take from this concert. It's a wondrous ghost from the ecstatic deep of tragic sublimity, like the last acts of King Lear and Macbeth, Satan's war speech to his demons, Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor, Dante's&nbsp;and Francesca, The Whiteness of the Whale, The Penal Colony, Ecclesiastes and Job, the Lamentations of Jeremiah and the songs of Isaiah, Guernica, The Last Judgement, The Triumph of Death, Saturn Devouring His Son, the finale of Don Giovanni and the Bach Chaconne and the Toccata and Fugue and Death and the Maiden and the opening of Beethoven's 9th taken to apocalyptic proportions. I don't expect to ever hear Mahler&nbsp;like that ever again. I didn't know it was even possible, and I wonder if it's even worth ever listening to it again. This wasn't just how Bernstein or Tennstedt conducted it - magnificent as they are, this is how Furtwangler and Mengelberg might have conducted it if they ever did. Mahler 6&nbsp;is much too intense to ever be a favorite piece of mine or anybody else's, but after a good but still a bit earthbound performance of the first movement, I sat in that audience for the rest of this performance with my hand over my mouth, barely able to take in enough air. This was music.</div></div><div class="gmail-_5pbx gmail-userContent" id="gmail-js_75" style="color: #1d2129; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 1.38; overflow: hidden;"><div class="gmail-text_exposed_root gmail-text_exposed" style="display: inline;"><br /></div></div><div class="gmail-_5pbx gmail-userContent" id="gmail-js_75" style="color: #1d2129; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 1.38; overflow: hidden;"><div class="gmail-text_exposed_root gmail-text_exposed" style="display: inline;">How it was done was another issue entirely. I wasn't even certain it was a great performance for the first half of it. Rattle played the first movement at a slow march tempo with very little rubato, telegraphing very little of what was to come. He then, contrary to my tastes, placed the Adagio second, and lulled us with beauty past beauty into a false sense of security. It was gorgeous, it was also a good 30% slower than one hears in more classically minded performances like Szell and Boulez.&nbsp;</div></div><div class="gmail-_5pbx gmail-userContent" id="gmail-js_75" style="color: #1d2129; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 1.38; overflow: hidden;"><div class="gmail-text_exposed_root gmail-text_exposed" style="display: inline;"><br /></div></div><div class="gmail-_5pbx gmail-userContent" id="gmail-js_75" style="color: #1d2129; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 1.38; overflow: hidden;"><div class="gmail-text_exposed_root gmail-text_exposed" style="display: inline;">Then came the Scherzo, when not a phrase went by without a tempo change. The odd burlesque Mahler conjures is generally thought to be a parody of the opening movement, not so in Rattle's hands. In Rattle's hands, it is like a ghostly waltz-parody, not unlike the scherzo of the 7th symphony or La Valse, but far more ghostly. Rattle's 1989 recording gives you some idea of what he did, but he chanced still more tempo changes and bends in this performance.&nbsp;</div></div><div class="gmail-_5pbx gmail-userContent" id="gmail-js_75" style="color: #1d2129; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 1.38; overflow: hidden;"><div class="gmail-text_exposed_root gmail-text_exposed" style="display: inline;"><br /></div></div><div class="gmail-_5pbx gmail-userContent" id="gmail-js_75" style="color: #1d2129; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 1.38; overflow: hidden;"><div class="gmail-text_exposed_root gmail-text_exposed" style="display: inline;">Then came, holy shit, that finale. It was not simply a tragic statement or a statement about war, much as it may be both, but thanks to such a strange scherzo, we were able to perceive still new levels of strangeness in this music, which Rattle bequeathed to us utterly unblunted, every moment seemingly played for maximum impact while dispensing of formal niceties. Perhaps tragedy plus strangeness equals horror, and what we got here was not simply a classically proportioned depiction of war as Semyon Bychkov seemed to view it last January when he directed the New York Philharmonic in this piece, but a terrifying apparition - truly perhaps what Lenny meant when he said that Mahler foresaw the twentieth century. I fear without wading far into the details of how Rattle interpreted and the players played in this or that measure, I cannot do justice to what they did. It will have to suffice to say again, this was MUSIC.&nbsp;</div></div><div class="gmail-_3x-2" style="color: #1d2129; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif;"><div class="gmail-mtm" style="margin-top: 10px;"><div class="gmail-_6m2 gmail-_1zpr gmail-clearfix gmail-_dcs gmail-_4_w4 gmail-_5cwb" id="gmail-u_5t_q" style="max-width: none; overflow: hidden; z-index: 0; zoom: 1;"><div class="gmail-clearfix gmail-_2r3x" style="zoom: 1;"><div class="gmail-lfloat gmail-_ohe" style="float: left;"><span class="gmail-_3m6-"></span><br /><div class="gmail-_6ks" style="line-height: 0; z-index: 1;"><div id="gmail-u_5t_r"><span class="gmail-_3m6-"><a aria-label="**♪Mahler: Symphony No. 6, &quot;Tragic&quot; ; Leonard Bernstein / Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra 1988" class="gmail-_6kt gmail-_6l- gmail-__c_" href="https://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DL-My1Y2wJds&amp;h=DAQEZdpU6&amp;enc=AZPh4PAwsYnwlxyi6N_G_W8x4AZA_y_jLCul96Ycu7VRmKg6ESDNNiiItkAKiCPQph5XWFCaMJB0hbunPjglwlH15hfzG2C_ChUSOzb55NywH4L44vW5ner9xb1zfcYISR_nZTJpc_A6A33MYJ8Zuz4J94SlDHJgDlkmw4-0uPyRfhaoL2QIFurpLWdOXlnZwgfjx73bpygBSduJ3MelZtMs&amp;s=1" rel="nofollow async" style="color: #365899; cursor: pointer; display: block; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"></a></span></div></div><span class="gmail-_3m6-"></span></div></div></div></div></div></div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;"><div class="gmail-_5pbx gmail-userContent" id="gmail-js_75" style="color: #1d2129; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 1.38; overflow: hidden;"><span style="color: #222222; font-family: &quot;arial&quot; , sans-serif; font-size: xx-small;"><b>October 15: Baltimore Symphony - V. Petrenko</b></span></div></div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;"><b><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=km5BWuolJPY">Beethoven Coriolan</a></b></div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;"><b><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1QNhRNxvTI">Beethoven Piano Concerto 3</a></b></div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;"><b><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSIUsUUmnQw">Shostakovich 10</a></b></div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;"><br /></div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;">Vassily Petrenko is as gifted as a conductor can get while still giving no indication of any sort of intellectual or emotional depth. In Shostakovich, he clearly knows how to get precisely the right sonorities and balances in loud and soft passages and everything between to make your hair stand straight up. In Beethoven piano concertos he knows exactly how to accompany in such a manner that deflects attention to his soloist and fits the soloist like a glove.&nbsp;</div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;"><br /></div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;">But Shostakovich 10 is not just a Prokofiev-like rollercoaster. It is, like Mahler 6, one of the great tragic statements in music, and again like Mahler 6, all the more tragic for being so ironic and strange. When the playing is so magnificent, one might be thought ungrateful for uttering any 'but' in addition to awesome praise for an awesome performance... but...</div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;"><br /></div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;">I went back home afterward, I listened to Shostakovich 10 as rendered by Mravinsky, Kondrashin, Oistrakh, Sanderling, Gergiev, Nelsons, Ancerl, Mitropoulos, Jansons, Shipway, (yes, I'm weird, get over it), and particularly when one hears Oistrakh and Gergiev, you immediately perceive a songfulness, a tragedy, a loss, a humor, a depth, about which Petrenko might not have the foggiest idea. The noise was awesome, but a beginning listener could walk away from that performance without it occurring to them that Shostakovich 10 is about anything at all.&nbsp;</div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;"><br /></div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;">The soloist, on the other hand, Inon Barnatan, is Beethovenian to the marrow. Everything a magnificent Beethoven pianist is supposed to be, Barnatan is. Effortless virtuosity and iridescent fire, leavened by every bit as much poetry and humanity, and an organizational mind to fuse it all together seamlessly. This was as great a performance of Beethoven 3 as the world can ever hear. I hope to hear this pianist many more times over the years. Petrenko was a perfect accompanist to him, a perfect conducting machine - a second Karajan or Mravinsky who could probably drill an orchestra to the level of the world's greatest, but it might be left to guest conductors to find the music which such precision makes possible.</div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;"><b>October 22: Baltimore Symphony - Lintu</b></div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;"><b><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TO3YRZWLvQo">Rautavaara Cantus Arcticus</a></b></div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;"><b><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abL--9pihnI">Beethoven Piano Concerto 1</a></b></div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;"><b><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXAv-NGppFw">Dvorak 8</a></b></div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;"><br /></div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;">If I had to venture a guess, Marin Alsop will leave the BSO in 2021. Her contract is up, she'll be 65, and she'll try to use her seventies to chase one last chance for a prestige appointment. I have no doubt she's chomping to get her hands on the San Francisco Symphony when MTT leaves, or perhaps the BBC Symphony. Will she get them? Will she want to stay once she gets these poisoned chalices? Who knows, even if she ends up in St. Louis or Detroit or Cincinnati after Baltimore, it will be a career well spent.&nbsp;</div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;"><br /></div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;">If the BSO manages to stay a full-time orchestra after Alsop leaves and only 500 listeners show up to any performance, the director will probably be Hannu Lintu, one of the army of tall blond Finns bombarding the orchestral scene at the current moment. Like the Hungarian maestri of yesteryear, these Finns all seem cut from the same cloth. Superbly analytical musical minds that respond incredibly well to new music, quite capable and musically sound in traditional rep, but a little bit arid and too given to virtuoso grandstanding like fast tempos and crisp precision.&nbsp;</div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;"><br /></div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;">I yearn, I wilt, I pine, for Markus Stenz to be the next director. But it's amazing that a conductor both this advanced in his career and this genuinely great has agreed to come to Baltimore as a principal guest for three weeks a year, let alone ten or twelve. Stenz is not a perfect conductor, given to flights of virtuoso grandstanding in which he takes fast tempos, seemingly for the sole purpose of showing off his magnificent conducting technique that can hold an orchestra together at tempos that most conductors would find impossible to manage (in the 90s, David Zinman had the same problem). But while Stenz is occasionally given to the same virtuoso slickness as Petrenko or Lintu, he provides musical revelation after revelation whenever he doesn't.&nbsp;</div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;"><br /></div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;">Hannu Lintu has the same virtuosity problem as Stenz, and gives into it rather more frequently. Lintu's been in Baltimore every year for the five I've lived in Baltimore as an adult, and he clearly finds it difficult to give into the better angels of his musical nature. The good news is that the better angels are most certainly there. And in these five performances, never have I heard them to better effect than this weekend.&nbsp;</div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;"><br /></div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;">Rautavaara's magnificent Cantus Arcticus received its Baltimore premiere this weekend, because Baltimore is finally ready for music composed in 1972..., and it was bloody magnificent. I love Rautavaara's music deeply. No composer of his generation wrote more gorgeous sonorities and harmonies, and while there is occasional unmistakable drift into Enya-like new age banality, a composer who wrote so much music has to have some duds. There is magnificence everywhere in his output, and still more in this particular music. Even amid such magnificence, you could see the elderly crowd grinding their bridges into dust as the bird soundscape made its electronic appearance - you could see their thought bubbles: MUSIC ISN'T SUPPOSED TO HAVE BIRDS!</div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;"><br /></div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;">What makes Cantus Arcticus so magnificent is not just the beauty of the string and wind writing, which might seem a little saccharine if taken on its own, or the bird soundscape, which is merely a soundscape without the music. When one puts the two together, you get something between beauty and ridiculousness, precisely the strangeness where sublimity can reside. By the end you have no idea what to make of this... strange bird... (I'll show myself out...)</div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;"><br /></div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;">Another Beethoven Piano Concerto, the first, this time with Angela Hewitt as the soloist. Hewitt is a very fine pianist beginning to get up there in years, you hear an occasional smudge in the runs, but you'd hear that from many pianists half her age. Hewitt is a very probing musician, perhaps too probing at the expense of other qualities, but Lintu wasn't quite with her. In the middle slow movement, she came in with a very slow and flexible tempo and gorgeously soft dynamics, yet Lintu seemed completely unaware of the specialness of what was developing right next to him, and inevitably brought the orchestra in at a faster, metric tempo and louder dynamic. But when Hewitt got to break free, she turned the piece into something completely different - the incredibly long and taxing cadenza in the incredibly long and taxing opening movement was absolutely magnificent - Hewitt seemed ready to tackle an Alkan Transcendental Etude at the end of it.&nbsp;</div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;"><br /></div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;">But within Lintu's gargantuan but lanky frame with its silver aging hipster faux-hawk and immaculately polished shoes is a real musical mind and heart, and it was on his sleeve during their performance of Dvorak 8. No musician in the world could probe more deeply than he made the BSO probe here. Whether it was cutting loose with the raucousness of Dvorak's Slavonic dance-party, or the breathtaking (and unmistakable in this performance) imitations of nature in the second movement, or the luminously beautiful panoply of melodies Dvorak invites us to share with him all through the score, Lintu gave us Dvorak as he should always be - bathed in the light of the air and the dirt of the earth, rubato everywhere, pianissimos so soft you had to strain to hear them from the front row (where I was sitting), uproarious noise when Dvorak is extraverted, stunning sensitivity when Dvorak is introverted.&nbsp;</div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;"><br /></div><div style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;">The eighth is my favorite Dvorak symphony - there is no straining for a grand symphonic statement, just an invitation to share in Dvorak's humanity and decency. Three seats to my right, there was an elderly man so slouched over that he looked a month away from the big concert in the sky. During that soft G-Major glimpse heaven towards the end of the finale, he began to cry as his wife consoled him. "It's so nice" he said to her. It was such a beautiful moment that I didn't begrudge him talking in such close proximity to the players, had they seen it, I doubt they would have either. &nbsp;&nbsp;</div>Evan Tuckerhttps://plus.google.com/101333496816879280258noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5120202207964289878.post-29761669830951025902016-10-22T18:18:00.001-04:002016-10-22T18:18:08.457-04:00Tales from the Old New Land - Tale 4: Just Steve (90%)<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And having a playback memory, Carmen remembered something he said about copying down everything he said that sounded vaguely like a reference to Isaiah 8:1, and recorded every word of what he said for fear that he'd demand of her why she did not comply with the order he gave mid-binge/tirade to record these pearls of wisdom. In fact, she did it immediately after he let her go from the ledge. She kept a copy of it on her person every day of her life, in case the Producer ever returned and demanded to see it.</span></div><span id="docs-internal-guid-091f4024-a147-1ba2-0aae-f70cf612e448" style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Producer and Carmen slugged on after that night for another sixteen months. When Carmen finally became Steve's, she was more radiantly beautiful than ever before for two whole decades, and considering the dangers she'd passed, one could argue that she was still more beautiful inside than out. Nevertheless, her ribs had the consistency of crushed ice, her joints bent in manners no human being should, the simple act of arising from her bed was pain itself. Among those who'd experienced repetitive trauma, it is not uncommon to deal with the constant rebreaking of bones, degenerative disc disease and an eventual lumbar spinal fusion; bone spurs, torn ligaments, degenerative arthritis, staff infections from corrective surgeries. And that's only from the effects from before he started to hit her face.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This is mercifully not a book in which to discuss the particulars of tyrannical behavior which cause such internal horror. This narrator has neither the patience nor nothing like the fortitude to speak in any more than generalities about the abominations perpetrated upon Carmen and he beseeches your forgiveness for his need to speak any further of these depravities. But if this fictional rendering of a single Hollywood player getting off on the scent of blood has anything like the ring of veracity to you, then he asks you to at least consider how many thousands there may have been over the past century of powerful Hollywood men who've acted precisely like this.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This particular apparition of a Producer knew on the night of this "window dressing" (his charming term for what transpired that dawn) that his days as a respected Hollywood player could be counted with two digits. Don't mind us the circumstances of his ignominy, there were any number of risible cinematic bombs in the late 70's and early 80's which wiped out Hollywood producers, production companies, and whole studios:</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">There was At Long Last Love, Peter Bogdanovich's trivial homage to 30's movie-musicals, Cole Porter songs, and Ernst Lubitsch romantic comedies - because nothing oozes Golden Age Hollywood class quite like Burt Reynolds, who became a superstar a few years previously when Deliverance allowed us to watch him kill a Georgia hillbilly with a crossbow while the hillbilly sodomized a 300 pound Ned Beatty as Ned's ordered to squeal like a pig. There was The Exorcist II: The Heretic, a shameless money grab of a sequel starring a miserable looking Richard Burton during a period when he looked like he was taking parts in horrible movies just so he could pay his astronomical bar tab. There was The Swarm, a horror movie about killer bees that starred Michael Caine, Henry Fonda, Richard Widmark, and Olivia de Havilland - because what everybody wanted to see in the late 70's was the biggest stars of 1945 in a horror movie with a plot too absurd for Roger Corman to film. There was I Spit On Your Grave - a film that couldn't even find distribution for two years because of its quarter-hour depictions (notice the plural) of gang rape. There was X-rated Caligula, a movie made through the combined talents of literary lion Gore Vidal and Bob Guccione - publisher of Penthouse Magazine, who simply wanted to record a literal rendering of the depraved events within the Roman Emperor Caligula's palace in Tacitus's Annals. Every imaginable degradation seemed to find its way into the script; raping a bride on her wedding day - and her groom, sex shows involving children and the deformed (if you don't believe me, watch it), gladiatorial public execution, and a confusing scene for which poor Helen Mirren has to use what is hopefully a prosthetic vaginal cavity to depict herself giving birth as part of a (literally) execrable performance within all these execrable performances. After seeing the original cut, Guccione decided that audiences weren't getting their money's worth, and insisted on inserting a forty-five minute bisexual orgy near the end which the Roman Senators and their wives are coerced into having.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">There was, of course, Heaven's Gate, which lost 30 million dollars, ran to nearly four hours in original cut, deliberately killed a horse with explosives, was yanked from movie theaters after less than a week, and bankrupted United Artists - according to most experts the greatest of all movie studios - forever. Some swear it's a misunderstood masterpiece, this narrator doesn't want to find out... Of course, it has a ten minute rape scene...</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">There was Inchon, the B-Movie hagiography for America's Five-Star General in Asia, and for a moment in 1952 America's would-be dictator, Douglas MacArthur. Financed with no expense spared by a combination of the United States Military and world's most infamous cult leader, the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, with MacArthur played by the world's greatest actor - the ailing Lord Lawrence Olivier - for a cool million bucks, and directed by Terrance Young, who made the first few James Bond movies. MacArthur's closest confidante was played by Richard Roundtree, the original Shaft. Who'd have conceived that a movie of such disparate parts would come unglued?</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">There was Tarzan, the Ape Man - in which a mythical White Ape turns out to be a white man raised by apes and therefore must be brought back to civilisation in England where he can be taught proper discourse. Nevertheless, he retains the animal sexual magnetism of Africa, which overwhelms poor proper and prim Jane. Tarzan's character was found offensive by some in the 1910's when he first appeared, imagine the reception by 1981. Yet somehow, there've since been another six Tarzan movies.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And who can, or should, forget George Lucas's Howard the Duck? A PG live-action movie in which a loveable alien duck gets transported through a wormhole to our world. In the course of the movie, he gets dumped by a club bouncer into a hot tub where a couple is having sex, a human that turns out to be an alien who has a tongue seems to extend like an erection in the presence of Lea Thompson, Howard's duckbill attempts to bite the ass of a sixty-something black woman whose onion-like posterior he finds quite stimulating, he excitedly opens Playduck Magazine in which we see a photo of a duck with curves and hair and feathered white nipples (later in the movie we see duck boobies with pink human nipples), the Cleveland Police Department sexually assaults Howard the Duck, and actor Jeffrey Jones (himself now a convicted sex offender) walks in on Lea Thompson seducing Howard the Duck.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And, of course, Ishtar. The only of these risible and bank-busting movies directed by a woman, and the only one whose director never directed a movie again. Perhaps Ishtar was, truly, the last movie of the Old-New Hollywood - directed by Mike Nichols's old comic partner Elaine May, Dustin Hoffman and Warren Beatty starring, Vittorio Storaro (Coppola and Bertolucci's cinematographer of choice) doing the photography, co-starring New Hollywood luminaries like Tess Harper (Tender Mercies) Charles Grodin (from an Orthodox family), Jack Weston (Weinstein), Carol Kane (Woody's first wife in Annie Hall and an Oscar nominee for a part in Hester Street that she acted in Yiddish), Aharon Ipale (Israeli), Fred Melamed (Sy Ableman in A Serious Man), David Margulies (Hollywood's character actor of choice when you needed a Jew). Is it any wonder that a film bombed that had so many Jews involved whose scenario was in an Arab country? </span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Something rotted in that air of freedom which made the New Hollywood Golden Age possible. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. It was inevitable that the freedom which allowed for realistic depictions of ordinary people with their ugliness intact, with sex, and violence, and emotional turmoil unshielded by a production code, would curdle into freedom's betrayal by making its depictions into something sickeningly exploitative - sometimes freedom's very liberators betrayed it. In the case of Hollywood, what appeared to be a glorious liberation turned out to be merely another swing of the pendulum that landed on equilibrium for a moment before swinging into decadence. Today's Hollywood has a new production code, a code that allows for rivers of blood so long as the violence is confined to an unrealistic genre and its human consequences softpedaled, a code that allows for the naive innocence of children to continue unabated into adulthood with bro comedies about manchildren, a code which only allows romantic comedies in which love's ugly moments are airbrushed out of existence, a code dominated by action movies for which the stars are the special effects. Just as in the old production code, today's Hollywood movies can still be damn good, but in the opinion of this clearly not humble enough narrator, almost none of them show us ourselves. There are ways around the problem - movies like The Social Network and Her and WALL-E and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which only show us a complex image of the human spirit by showing us how technology may have completely reshaped it; or movies like Boyhood or the Before movies or (believe it or not) Borat, in all of which the experimental gimmick that makes them possible is so radically extreme that they can only be done once and never be copied. There are some very fine and human directors working in Hollywood's orbit if not actually 'in' Hollywood: there are at least two American treasures: Alexander Payne and Richard Linklater, both of whom manage in every movie to say something new and elusive about America. Among the 'tribe', there's Jason Reitman, or at least was, who made three of the great American movies at the beginning of his career with Thank You For Smoking, Juno, and Up In The Air, all three of which manage to say something new and elusive about America, and there's John Sayles, whom nobody remembers anymore, but twenty years ago was the God of Independent American Film. There's Ang Lee, who isn't even American, but easily beats Americans at their own game. Errol Morris, the documentarian who makes movies so utterly different from everyone else's that you shouldn't even call them movies by the accepted definition. </span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Other than them, there are, as Woody once called them, the Academy of the Overrated: Tarantino, the Coen Brothers, David Lynch, PT Anderson, Wes Anderson (whom in all fairness seems to be improving), Spike Jonze, Charlie Kaufmann, David Fincher, Christopher Nolan, Steven Soderbergh (who at least tries to be more ambitious), Sofia Coppola, Peter Jackson, Ken Burns (it takes a rare talent to make the subjects of his documentaries boring), David O Russell, the Wachowskis, Gus Van Sant, Tim Burton, James Cameron... </span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">These are directors so enamored of movies that they jam pack their movies with references to other movies and forget to put references to life in them. Perhaps that statement is unfair, there are exceptions in every one of their outputs, but the exceptions are very few compared to the misfires. There is a kind of ersatz profundity to their movies - movies like The Matrix and Inception and Avatar and I Heart Huckabees (a movie I used to love) with philosophical messages that can fit inside a fortune cookie; a ponderousness which PT Anderson mistakes for profundity, an incomprehensibility which Charlie Kaufmann mistakes for intellectual challenge, a cynical darkness which David Fincher and the Coen Brothers mistake for gravity, an arrested development which Tim Burton and Wes Anderson mistaken for whimsy, a reliance on CGI which Christopher Nolan and the Wachowskis and James Cameron mistake for visual artistry (it's the technicians who are the artists), a reliance on other movies which Tarantino and David Lynch mistake for ironic commentary. In each of these cases, the problem is that they're weighted down by the baggage of movie history. The movies before them were simply too good, so rather than try to compete with them catharsis for catharsis, they dodge the challenge and instead create homages to what older masters did better than they did, and many critics call these postmodern homages 'original' when the only thing that's original about them is their lack of emotional demand on the audience. These are movies about other movies, and therefore perhaps they're movies against movies. Most alarmingly, and prevalent to nearly all of them, are the movies that mistake technology for humanity. Even among the directors unaddicted to CGI, there are more breathtaking shots in today's American movies than ever before. If nature doesn't give you the background you want, if the lighting on some actress's face is not quite what you want, if her jawline is not quite the way you'd like it, you can digitally alter it to any specification you like; but to what end? Today's auteurs have utterly mastered the technical end of filmmaking, and perhaps because we've mastered technique, we've forgotten what the technique is for. &nbsp;</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Meanwhile, people who've devoted their whole lives to film tell us that the world is experiencing a cinematic Golden Age of which the United States is the only first world country who remains excluded. As with so many things about Contemporary America - soccer, news, public transit, languages, condoms, history, black humor, cheap health care, gun laws, and vegetables - we have in America have only the dimmest awareness of the feast that often seems to happen in every corner of the globe but ours because we're too busy playing with our toys. </span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Special effects are the new stars of Hollywood. The highest grossing movies are no longer character based movies like The Godfather or Bonnie and Clyde or Midnight Cowboy or Easy Rider or American Graffiti or Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid or The Sting or One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest or MASH or Fiddler on the Roof or Patton. There were plenty of smaller, character driven films during these years that did well, but it was between 1975 and 1990 that technology become the undisputed box office king, and after that came the systematic gutting of movies that portrayed Americans in their natural state in anywhere but independent film and the Miramax ghetto. Just over the other side of 1975 lay the Star Wars Trilogy and Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Indiana Jones and ET and Back to the Future and Roger Rabbit - and how human and full of personality do those early Spielberg and Lucas and Zemeckis movies seem next to the high-grossing movies of our time! Would it surprise anyone that Tom Cruise or Chris Hemsworth or Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson were actually computer programs or robots that only exist on a screen? There was even an Al Pacino movie about that exact notion fifteen years ago called Simone. Maybe Jennifer Lawrence is just an updated Simone, an indication that these computer avatars have improved to the point that seem so like us humans that perhaps humans are indistinguishable now from robots!</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This New New Hollywood came into existence because the knowledge that movies like Caligula and I Spit On Your Grave and Heaven's Gate and Howard the Duck gave us of what we were capable of was too terrible. The freedom to create greater and more uplifting spectacles can also give us things too vile and revolting for contemplation. All it took was less than a dozen movies in which the human animal was presented to us undeniably in all its stinking shit, and the movie world's been running away from its truth ever since.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Our dearly beloved Producer could have been working on any of these movies, it doesn't matter which, but by the same time the next year, The Producer hadn't worked on a movie for nine months; nine months during which his fists literally performed an abortion on Carmen. Perhaps it became his sole source of satisfaction and relief, because for six months, no glamorous friend returned a call, relieving him not only of his own glamor but the sycophants who glommed onto it. Friendship is fleeting, love mere folly, but how much more true would that be when living in a place known as the 'Dream Factory?' But f</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">ive minutes after every time he went off, he begged her not to leave, just you wait, he'll make you happy again, Hollywood can be something better than its ever been, and you'll be its leading lady!</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Then there was the time the Producer bruised her father up after her father asked about Carmen's bruises. Two minutes later, he gave her Dad a $10,000 wad of cash, then drove him to the emergency room personally in his 1977 Lamborghini Countach. The moment he got through the door, he took out more wads of cash for the doctor and nurses and the other patients - they saw nothing. And while they were in the ER, Carmen's sister practically kidnapped her to a courthouse to make her get a restraining order. Carmen was unwilling, worried she was about to get killed. If not by her producer, then by the guys he'd pay to keep her quiet. The judge listened very patiently and carefully and evinced great compassion for her suffering, he then excused himself to his chamber for five minutes, came back and refused the restraining order. Twelve minutes later, the Producer was at the courthouse, gave Carmen a huge hug and kiss as she sobbed her tears upon him, took her home and told her over and over again how much he loved her. Two days later, they were engaged, and she was the one who wanted to go to the courthouse right away; but he promised her a wedding the whole world would know about, the wedding she deserved.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Who could turn down the life he promised? This was a man who knew how to turn the curvature of the Earth to the precise angle he wanted. He was the best actor in Hollywood. For more than a decade, he dealt with creative geniuses every day of his life, but he was a genius of life itself. Every event, the most glamorous, the most spiritual, the most transcendent, the most intangible, could be picked apart and reduced to a transaction. Nothing in life was a mystery to him, and all he demanded in return was that she be no more complicated to understand than the concierge in Oviedo.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Even so, no matter how much of a genius he was, in order to have that wedding, he had to be back in the good graces of Hollywood, and in order to return to Hollywood's graces, he had to be in the graces of multinationals who bought Hollywood up.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It was just at this moment that our dear Producer, whose tastes in cuisine had always seemed tending to the upscale LA specialties of shellfish, steak, and sushi, seemed to develop a yen for rouladen, kasespatzle, saurbraten, kartoffelknodel, bretzels and wurst. Carmen had no idea why the Producer wanted them to go for German every night, and of course he wouldn't explain except to say that there was a different dish he wanted them to try. One night at Old World German Restaurant, the next at Van Nuys German Deli (a standup counter place for which he still insisted that Carmen wear heels), the next at Alpine Village, and the same every night for five or six weeks. Within a month, the Producer was a good twenty pounds heavier, but the moment Carmen's dress seemed a bit tighter, the Producer did what he could to make her not finish what he ordered for them. She would wrap the remains up and take home what remained in a doggie bag, then find them missing from the fridge the next morning.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">About five to six weeks in, the Producer pointed to a table across the restaurant. "That's Karlheinz von Huntze, Executive Vice-President of Polygram Entertainment." Until the 60's, Polygram was a third-German, third-Dutch, third-British corporation responsible for no less than seven of the world's major classical music labels and another ten of the world's major Popular Music labels. A number of these labels were all too happy to collaborate with Hitler's culture ministers in times gone by, but Polygram controlled a vast swath of the great musical glories of the gramophone - glories set down before, during, and after the Second World War: Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Earl Hines, Dizzy Gillespe, Woody Herman, Charlie Parker, Bill Evans, Stan Getz, Oscar Petersen, Lester Young, Billie Holiday, Eartha Kitt, untold numbers of Broadway Musicals, Patsy Cline, Loretta Lynn, George Jones, the Rolling Stones and Elvis during some of their best periods, Eric Clapton, Talking Heads, the Ramones, KISS, Billy Joel, Donna Summer, the Village People, the Bee Gees, ABBA, The Osmonds, Yves Montand, Jacques Brel, Edith Piaff, and hundreds of other pop music acts; nearly every major mid-century orchestral conductor, untold numbers of great classical soloists and opera singers and chamber ensembles, the premiere recordings of every postwar work by Benjamin Britten and Ralph Vaughan Williams, untold numbers of moderately obscure and young and unproven composers whom no major label today would take a chance on, the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, the Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam, the London Symphony Orchestra, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra... In 1963, it was Polygram's by then long since subsidiary, the Dutch Phillips Electronics (founded by Karl Marx's uncle), that invented the tape cassette.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">By 1980, Polygram was surely too big to fail, and yet... its catalogue was simply too large, and it had to either expand significantly to make up for its losses, or shed an enormous part of its product. Since there was very little in music of which they didn't own a significant portion, it was time to move into Movies. What better way to do that than Movie Musicals? Polygram had a 50% share in RSO Records, which gave them a huge profit in the Disco market because RSO Records had the music distribution rights to Grease and Saturday Night Fever. This was in addition to the money made from their contracts with the Bee Gees and the Village People and Donna Summer. Unfortunately, this was nowhere near enough to cover their bill. They needed a movie musical of their own.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Enter Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band... THE MUSICAL! Yes, all the Beatles hits are here, sung as you've always wanted to hear them sung by Peter Frampton, the Bee Gees, and Steve Martin. With cameos from Aerosmith, Alice Cooper, Earth Wind &amp; Fire, Dr. John, Etta James, Curtis Mayfield, Bonnie Raitt, Frankie Valli, and a hundred other musicians - none of which sing their original music, and narrated by George fucking Burns (now there's a name that'll put the young bums in the seats...). God knows how many hundreds of millions Polygram had to pay to acquire the rights for them from EMI, but it was just another couple hundred million pulled down the drain of this spectacular musical black hole. Ever the artistes, John and George refused to even attend the premiere, no doubt they took the money though; while ever the workhorses, Paul and Ringo went to the premiere, then refused to have anything more to do with the movie, or with Polygram.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And there sits Karlheinz von Huntze, all sixty-seven years and 350 pounds of him squeezed into a fecally brown suit that probably fit him when he was fifty-five with a badly tied thin tie that didn't reach his naval, unashamed of his brown teeth and double chin that went past his neck, all of which bit with great begeisterung into the giant plate of braten and sauerkraut in front of him, yet vain enough about his hair to wear a spectacularly bad salt and pepper toupee whose base seemed to levitate an inch and a half over his boneless skull and continue six inches up. On his left hand, a wedding ring seems as though it might at any moment pop off his brat-like finger.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So this was it... The perfect movie musical star - a gorgeously unique looking petite girl with a large head, already well known and liked by everybody in Hollywood, packed to the gills with brains and lungs; no singing lessons necessary, no acting lessons necessary, minimal dancing, can play piano, knows every jazz standard in the Real Book. All it takes is one movie, then she has her choice - greatest living singer or greatest living actress? It's needless to say who's on her arm and advising her every decision.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And of course, she's brilliant when she talks to Huntze. Within ninety seconds, the Producer excuses himself to the bathroom and seems to stay in there for forty minutes. She speaks to him in the fluent German she picked up from her opera training, they compare the Schubert and Goethe they love best, they sing the Papageno and Pamina duet from Mozart's Die Zauberflote at the table (the restaurant bursts into applause, more for Carmen...). He orders four different deserts, and insists on splitting each of them with her and that she eat up her half to the every mouthful. He gives her a standing invitation to visit him and his wife in Hamburg so she can see the Kunsthalle and the Dichterhallen and walk through the taverns where the young Brahms played, and tells her that he'd love to hear her play piano before he leaves town. He writes down an address of a private residence of a freund at who's place he's staying.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Of course, very little piano was played. Someone already as thoroughly demoralized as Carmen has no illusions left of the necessities expected of her. If anything, she was thankful for Herr Huntze's patronizing kindness. The cutesy/schatzi German nicknames he gave her, the grandfatherly forcefeeding of Stroh and Obstwasser before geschlechtich verkehren and makronen afterward (which of course came to her mouth via his boneless hand). He told her she was a shoo-in, all she had to do was meet with a few more people at Polygram and they'd make a musical as a vehicle for her! </span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It is, of course, needless to tell you that something similar was expected at every new meeting with every member of the Polygram team: Germans, Austrians, Swiss, Dutch, Danish... Old world gentlemen all of them, their courtly manners justifying their sense of entitlement to the world. A few of them were quite attractive - tall, silver-haired gentlemen with immaculately tailored three-piece suits surrounding dark paisley ties or ascots tucked into perfectly pressed shirts; sculpted hair and pencil-thin mustaches above the thin and constantly pursed lips that smoked long thin cigarettes; they wore scarves in the summer and walked with ornate canes - even the young ones seemed old. The bald ones generally had combovers with more mousse than hair, the fat ones always had watch chains on their vests. Never would she leave without an extremely expensive gift - a Channel perfume, a Swarovski Chocolate Box, a De Beer diamond ring, a dress from Christian Dior (and of course, the measurements were perfect). When meeting her at the door they would bend down and kiss her on the hand, or kiss her on each cheek, sometimes three times rather than two. Conversation was always quite pleasant, the meals were always the height of gourmet and gourmand, the wines they picked were amazing (at least when they weren't German...), and occasionally they even flew her to Germany. Karlheinz even got her to the Dichterhallen.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Producer seemed strangely OK with all this. He never asked her where she was going, gave her free use of whatever car she wanted, and he seemed happier than he'd ever been in their relationship. He was on the phone 18 hours a day, his old friends were his friends again, and during that month when she was in meetings and gaining nearly thirty pounds from all the decadent dishes she'd eaten - which made outfits much tighter and her curves still more alluring - his life was back to a whirlwind of tennis, power lunches, movie pitches from him, and movie pitches to him.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Early in the evening of September 19th, Carmen returned to the house to find every light in the house on, the mirrors covered, the unshaven Producer wearing what looked like a white bathrobe and a fisherman's cap on his head, but all of the cap but the bill was covered by a blindingly white shawl with blue stripes over his head. Carmen knew that it was obviously a tallis, but it was much longer than any she'd ever seen before. He was standing in the corner of his living room, his back to the wall, bending his torso up and down at the speed of sound as he read from a black book while his lips moved with barely any sound at all at the speed of light. He didn't even seem to notice her, and as she walked in his line of vision, she saw that not only was he wearing his favorite tie, but the tie was cut in the middle, almost the entire way through.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Before she could even ask what was wrong, he looked at her and emphatically intoned:</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">"Vahyigah hadawvawr el meylekh nineveh mikis'aw va'yo'aw'ver ahdahrtaw meyawlawv."</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And then he began to walk directly towards her, staring her deadly cold in the eye and taking a step a few inches forward with every seven words:</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">"For the word came unto the King of Nineveh and he arose from his throne and he laid his throne from him and covered him with sackcloth and sat in ashes and he caused it to be proclaimed and published through Nineveh by the decree of the King and his nobles saying let neither man nor beast nor herd nor flock taste any thing let them not feed nor drink water but let man and beast be covered with sackcloth and cry mightily unto Adonai yea let them turn every one from his evil way and from the violence that is in their hands."</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">He then stared at his hand for a moment that seemed like fifteen, as unaware as she was about what he was about to do.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">"You didn't get the part."</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And then he dislodged her cornea.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">-----------------------------------------------------</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This is the last we will ever say of the particulars of physical abuses perpetrated upon Carmen, and while he can make no promises, the narrator very much hopes that this is the last time he feels the need to elucidate any details of gendered violence in what will hopefully become a mega/meta-novel that takes decades to write for many, many hundreds of pages, if ever. We do, however, have to speak rather lengthily about the repercussions of what was perpetrated upon Carmen, but fortunately, the details of that will proceed organically from the story - with some digressions of course...</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">"Of course you can stay at my place. However long you need to. I hope you don't mind though, my housemate has a friend staying on our sofa but my room has a foldout couch."</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Steve lets Carmen in, they walk into his room, she sees the 250 books on his shelves, she sees the violin case on the fold-out couch, she sees the projector screen covering the window and the projector at the far end of the room with a pile of classic movie canisters as tall as she is; the proverbial cat is out of the bag and she breaks down weeping. Steve holds Carmen to console her, but he has no idea what he's consoling, and while he asks, he's not about to push the matter.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">When Carmen finally feels better, she walks over to the canisters, picks out Casablanca, and for two hours they lie down and decide that the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world... It's a Monday night. On Tuesday, they watch The Best Years of Our Lives. On Wednesday, It's A Wonderful Life. Thursday, City Lights. Friday, It Happened One Night. Saturday, &nbsp;The Philadelphia Story. Sunday, Steve finally shows her his favorite movie: Sunrise; meaning not that his favorite movie is somewhere between a pretentious statement about nature and a pickup line, but Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans, the 1927 masterpiece co-awarded the first ever Best Picture Oscar (even in the first year of the Oscars they could award it all to the best movie...) and a movie that should reduce every living being to a puddle of feelings by its end. It was directed by F.W. Murnau, a young German moviemaker recently immigrated to the United States, who might have proven greater than either Hitchcock or Welles had a car accident not claimed him four years later.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">On this, Steve and I completely agree, Sunrise is more than a simply great film. To me it is, next to Citizen Kane, nothing less than the cornerstone of all movies ever made in this country. The dawn at the end of Sunrise is not simply a metaphor for the dawn of a reinvigorated rural marriage, it is a metaphor for the American dawn, for the dawn of movies themselves, for the dawn of witnessing art enacted for us by our fellow humans on a durable screen rather than in our imaginations from a flimsy piece of paper; for the dawn of a modern era when the hope of the New World emerges from the despair of the Old - for the passing of the torch from a world that once coveted Northern European ideals like civilization, education, and culture, to a world that coveted American ideals like life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Perhaps these new ideals will prove equally unfulfillable to the old ones, but not yet at least, and while there's no doubt that it's hokey to say that the Sun rose on a new day with this movie, it's no less true for being hokey.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It's probably worth mentioning that some night after one of these movies, they have sex for the first time, and perhaps nearly as importantly, Steve has sex for the first time; this era was a few years before it became a given that 95% of students would lose their virginity by the end of college. I'd like to say that they first did it after they watched "It Happened One Night," but that is much too on the nose...</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Steve, like most men, particularly most young men who've never had sex before, has no idea what might cause women discomfort, even if it might seem obvious to them in distant retrospect. It somehow never occurred to him that even a woman as intelligent as Carmen might dislike a movie in which a man who attempts to work up the nerve to drown his pure, Aryan-looking country wife (you can tell how innocent she is by her long blond hair wrapped in a tight bun) so he can take up full time with his knowing city tramp of a mistress with a nose slightly too large to not escape a semitic connotation, but if that's not enough to get the point, you can tell how 'knowing' she is from her black hair cut into a flapper haircut...), whom he also tries to kill when she suggests killing his wife to him - but </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">both times, being the splendidly ethical man he is at heart, </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">he manages to stop himself, and after his nearly killing the two women closest to him in twenty minutes, he resolves to redeem himself because of the purity of his wife's being and sufferance in his ignoring her, his wandering eye, and his bad mind for business that puts their country farm in danger. </span><br /><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">After he stands over her, his hands lurched outward in the manner of exaggerated silent movie murderousness as he attempts to work up the murderous nerve to throw her overboard from a canoe on a lake, she waits for her coward of a husband to row back ashore so she can abscond to a bus heading to the city, and he runs after her, begging her not to be afraid of him. She can't escape the iron grip of a husband a foot taller and wider in frame, and as he holds onto her, they wander into a city church, and they watch and listen as a clearly Lutheran priest officiates an expensive city wedding and intones from a cue card "God is giving you in the holy bonds of matrimony, a trust. She is young... and inexperienced. Guide her and love her... ...keep and protect her from all harm. Wilt thou LOVE her?" At which point this wayward, murderous hulk of a man becomes a teary and dewy eyed portrait of remorse who collapses into the lap of his suffering wife like Jesus in a pieta consoled by the Virgin Mary. Because what clearly matters is the husband's suffering, not the wife's.</span><br /><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And if that's not enough to make the Carmens of this world cringe, there's then the moment in the beauty parlor, when the wife runs away in horror from a barber with the temerity to try to take her hair out of its virginal bun - her purity thankfully intact. Then there's the set piece with another 'knowing floozy' who tries to give the husband a manicure, suggestively pulling his hand out from underneath the barber's smock, only for him to swat away her ministrations to his wife's all-consuming relief. A moment later, when an upper-class man tries to get fresh with this innocent country wife and breaks off one of the flowers bought her by her husband to put into his lapel, the husband emerges from under the barber's smock, freshly shaved, and this so recently almost murderer draws a pocket knife, only to nip the flower off as the gentleman covers his neck with his hand, clearly certain that the husband was about to give him what the OJ Simpson defense team called the Colombian Necktie. </span><br /><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And yet, amid all this psychotic violence is the simple story of a married couple falling back in love with one another by experiencing a new facet of life - an innocent rural couple, firmly fastened to the prison of country life's slowness that's caused so much desperation and longing in modern literature, arriving in the bustle and activity of the city to find the life and action for which they ache, and arrive at that perverse balance between the innocence of children and the tragic knowledge of adulthood's sacrifices that is romance - that bond we all seek, the eternal spring of life's being, the fleeting moments we wish are forever, when life as must happen disappears and all that remains is life as we wish it to be. And yet in order for life to occur as we wish it to be, life must be disappointing enough to form our wishes. </span><br /><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And after bits with a drunk pig, impossible to explain, accidentally breaking the head off a statue during some horseplay, making out in what the emotion seems to transform a crowded thoroughfare into the Garden of Eden, and then drunkenly making out as flying angels form ring around them, shortly before which the husband wants to beat up yet another upper-class twit for suggesting that the couple do a country dance for a large city crowd - which they do to the city dweller's eruptive delight. </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">They sail home by moonlight, 'a second honeymoon' the wife calls it with all the literalness of a pure country girl, her errant husband, who nearly drowned her on the same boat that morning, as in love as he probably was on their first honeymoon. She falls into blissful sleep upon his chest, and he gently places the lapel of his jacket over her face, in twelve hours, turning into good husband again who protects his wife. </span><br /><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">But in these days before doppler radar, a frenzied storm erupts as suddenly as the moonlight seemed eternal but </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">a moment ago</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">. Even the city dwellers duck for cover. The calmness of the lake upon which they live turns into a roaring sea, as the pure and terrified country wife holds onto her husband for dear life, preventing him from doing the rowing necessary to save them.</span><br /><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">The desperate husband wakes the whole town up and forms a search party on the lake. She survives by holding onto a bundle of bamboo picked and placed into the boat by his mistress - but not before he tries to kill his mistress yet again, this time, nearly succeeding, and we're half-rooting for him to be successful! But a figure who is probably the wife's mother tells him that she's been found and is alive. He comes back to her bedside and sits by it for the rest of the night, the entire town relieved and overjoyed that one of their own is not lost. The movie ends with the wife awakening, her long hair all the way down, bedecked in a white nightgown and white sheets, her roughly four-year-old son sleeping by her side, she awakens at the rising of the sun to her husband by her bedside, and they share a kiss that dissolves into rays of sunlight and the burst of the sun. Is it not the most beautiful image in all of cinema?</span><br /><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">18 hours after this husband almost became a wife-murderer and a few minutes after he almost becomes a mistress murderer, his wife awakens, and they live on, if not happily ever after, then redeemed with a second chance at life - the seemingly redeemed husband seemingly proven utterly deserving of happiness and forgiveness, never mind that had he remained a good husband, the life of his wife would never have been in danger, let alone twice, let alone that the first of the two times, he was the direct cause of the danger, never mind that he was almost became a murderer yet again just a moment before his reunion with his wife. </span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Sunrise is exactly as melodramatic a movie as it sounds like, with those utterly unbelievable silent movie gestures and a dramaturgy that wouldn't be believable in a Christmas pageant. And yet it should matter not a whit. Its melodrama is just a symptom of the metaphysical drama taking place onscreen. The metaphorical stakes are nothing less than a human soul, the husband's soul. What yetzer will the soul embrace? Will evil be rewarded and virtue punished? Is a redeemed soul that once strayed deserving of any reward? &nbsp;As melodramatic as Sunrise is, these are not questions easy to answer, and as any Hollywood movie must, Sunrise tries to answer them definitively, and yet it cannot. How many days before the husband erupts again in a violent rage? How many days before he tires of the farm and eye wanders again to another city girl who's probably named Rachel. </span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Sunrise speaks to us from another world where cynicism has yet to be invented. Men are men, strapping, quick to anger, quick to lust, quick to violence, yet able to be soothed by the purity of love, for which it is a woman's holy duty - a duty she can either assume, thereby becoming like an intercessing goddess, or reject, thereby becoming a whore. It is very easy to be cynical about such movies, and yet one's critical faculties feel an overwhelming urge to melt in the presence of such sincerity. Just as in the music of Bach or the painting of Rafael; Murnau arrived on world history at a very specific moment when his chosen artform was on an indivertible course to conquer the world with its power. 1927 was the final full year of film's Silent Era, and the very moment when visual storytelling blossomed in a manner never seen before and perhaps never since. In this final twilight of Silent Film, everything about the visual components of movies become as fluid and poetic as ballet - sets, lighting, costumes, exposures, even overacting: Sunrise, Metropolis, Faust, Flesh and the Devil, Mare Nostrum, The Son of the Sheik, Sparrows, The Temptress, What Price Glory?, The Winning of Barbara Worth, It, The Italian Straw Hat, London After Midnight, The General, Pandora's Box, The Crowd, The Wind, Underworld, The Unknown, Steamboat Bill Jr., An Andalusian Dog, Lonesome, The Passion of Joan of Arc, Queen Kelly, Sadie Thompson, Show People, Diary of a Lost Girl, The Lodger, Man With a Movie Camera, The Last Command, The Docks of New York, The Circus, 7th Heaven. Just as it was forty-five years later, there was something magic in the cellophane - but the magic dissipated far more quickly. The Golden Age our parents may currently reminisce upon took sixteen years between Bonnie and Clyde on one side and The Right Stuff on the other. The Golden Age which their grandparents remembered began around 1926 and was all over by 1929, but for those threeish years, all a director seemingly had to do was be competent at his job, and he'd create something eternal. </span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">There were flashier directors after Murnau who had much more trenchant insights into human nature</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">, but insight into humans would dilute everything which makes Murnau so special. Just as with Bach, I doubt there is a single artist in his medium who can make you believe again in everything about life about which you've abandoned all hope. If you're close to suicide, watch Sunrise. You may have thought yourself a cynic, but all bad feeling melts in the presence of its beauty - it is the beauty of dawn, of hope, of the idea that not a single person in the entire world is beyond redemption or undeserving of it. It tells the sinner within us all that no matter how badly we oppress others, we are not beyond mercy. It is the kind of hope that those of us privileged enough to feel will use as resolve to take our instinct toward sin and use it for virtue while having to question no longer what is virtuous: to move mountains, to overthrow governments, to build societies, to make a girl who was nearly a movie star into the love of your life.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And all this is precisely everything that Carmen least wanted to hear or see at this moment. Carmen was probably much too close to her agonies to experience anything like a trigger for reliving them, but the idea that a man who is so clearly evil can achieve redemption so quickly was everything that contradicted the last eighteen months of her life. When a man has murder in his heart, there is no redemption for him, and even if there is perhaps an infinitesimal possibility of redemption, it's certainly not something the man discovers over the course of a single fucking day. </span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Steve did not see her rolling her eyes and grinding her teeth and tensing up her hands in the darkness of his room. He often looked over at her to gauge her reaction, but never caught her at any particularly expressive moment. As we men do 95% of the time, he saw what we wished to see in this particular woman, and if men much more experienced and confident around women than young Steve have no idea what women are thinking, then how was Steve to know? And therefore it came as quite a shock to him when Carmen let out an enormous guffaw toward the end when this prodigally murderous husband kneels in a state of grace at the bedside of his utterly saintly, unblemishable, wife.</span></div><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The second after Carmen let out her roaring cackle, she apologized profusely, as anyone in a new relationship would after guffawing at a potential significant other's favorite movie. When Steve immediately turned the movie off and light on, she went somewhat limp, as though the dread coursing through her heart dissociating herself from the room before she had to experience the inevitable melodrama that would ensue. But, to her astonishment, Steve was extremely interested in knowing what she thought.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">But for one of the first times in her life, the inkwell of her verbal acuity had dried, and she was at a loss to explain precisely what she found so offensive about the movie.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Why did she weep when she saw his books? Because for the last few weeks, she'd found herself unable to recall what she'd read. Books were, to her, something to access with instant neurological availability. One glance at a piece of paper, and it was committed by heart for life. Whole tractates of the King James Bible, whole acts by Shakespeare, whole chapters of the Quixote and whole stories by Kafka she could recite in the original Castillian Spanish and Prague German with the exact pronunciation of its location and period, whole piano concertos by Mozart - both the solo piano part and the orchestral score, whole albums of Edith Piaf and whole operas by Verdi which she was able to sing and play on the piano as though it were second nature, not only able to sing any jazz standard or song by Dylan or The Beach Boys or trash song by Herman's Hermits or Tiny Tim, but able to improvise half-hour piano solos around them with countermelodies and modulations and thematic interpolations of a dozen other songs by the same artist and a dozen more by the artists they influenced and the artists who influenced them. Any one of which she could summon to mind and memory as though by animal instinct, as naturally as the rest of us take a breath or eat a meal after a day's fasting; any one of which were available to call to mind for an audition.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Her parents had no idea where she came from. They were rural immigrants like any rural immigrants, perhaps a bit better at what they did than most, and perhaps assimilated a bit more easily into American life than some did. Music was not something they made themselves, but at they were aware of music and loved it, and surely all four their own parents were musical - folk musicians to whom a career in music, or any career at all, was an utterly alien concept. When they weren't fishing or farming or selling their goods, they played the quena and the bandolina and banduryia and the bukhot; national instruments of the Philippines and Colombia, where their days were spent as farmers and fishermen, and nights around campfires and oil lamps with Tinkling and Muisca dancing - a life that could just as easily take place in either 1600 AD or BC as in 1940. You got up in the morning, you served your particular God, you did your best to avoid other spirits, and you went to sleep until one unsuspecting night when sleep claimed you. &nbsp;Legendary family stories developed around particular members of the family, but you didn't know if these family members died a few years before you were born, or a few hundred years; maybe even a few thousand. Perhaps variations on these particular stories were common to every family, every town, every region of the world, and perhaps all these folk tunes are just as similar from place to place. But because these stories and this music have no historical record, they seem infinitely more authentic - coming to us from that ether generated by the long darkness of pre-history, when the world was only explicable through magic. Life itself was magic, any day when a person was shielded from death was its own miracle that required a supernatural explanation. Every respite from death was a beautiful gift, every object of order that endowed life with ever so slightly more convenience was wrested from the chaos of nature, and therefore an object of indescribable beauty that could not be conceived had it not already existed. For a moment in these people's lives of whom we have no record, these artful objects did not imitate nature as so much humdrum art does, but rewrites nature's very laws, and therefore every folk tune was beautiful and perfect, every folk tale was beautiful and perfect, every pot and plate was beautiful and perfect, every meal was beautiful and perfect, all of them gifts handed down from above and below by forces well beyond their understanding, because they were all wrested from a nature that would never guarantee a life with the presence of any of them, and the presence of any of these gifts from the spiritual realm was a gift to be savored until the spiritual realm claimed them back. A pot, a plate, an instrument, could so easily break. A musician or a storyteller could die. The fish could disappear from the water, the crops not grow, the animals disappear from the forest. And where there was light, darkness would descend upon the face of the deep.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Miracles were not supposed to happen in America, and yet, here was the miracle that was Carmen Chavez - with all the advances in technique, here was a person who overcame technique and played with it as a baby does with a rattle. Perhaps she's a second Mozart, perhaps she's even a Shakespeare of performance - someone for whom a career as arm candy in a Burt Reynolds movie would be utterly wasted. She should be playing and singing Poulenc and Schubert at Carnegie Hall, she should be playing and singing Cleopatra and Sally Bowles on the West End.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Her parents, both of them, stopped going to church when they came to this country, but when Carmen sang lullabyes back to her mother when she was six months old, when she was speaking entire sentences at nine months in Spanish, English, and Tagalog, reading in all three languages by a little after her second birthday, and reading adult books by four years old. It was shortly after her fourth birthday that her parents had confirmation that something extraordinary was happening to their daughter - perhaps a literal confirmation. They flew back for a cousin's confirmation in Bagota when she was four, and during the celebration in the downstairs church rec room, somebody had broken into the organ loft and made the whole church resound with the note perfect melody of Alma Redemptoris Mater. After the melody was complete, it was played a second time with harmonies, and the harmonies were completely different than the usual organist, perhaps simpler but they worked just as well, perhaps better. But this was no teenage amateur breaking in - both the door and the organ were simply unlocked, and little Carmen, four years old but barely looking three, sitting down on a bench upon which her legs were barely long enough to reach the end of, let alone reach the pedals, and played on a keyboard all by herself. The organist was eating bandeja paisa and drinking aguardiente just as everybody else was, so he stormed up to the organ loft with his ever-ready switch, expecting to find some teenager with a year of piano lessons who broke in and possibly damaged the door. But the moment he saw this girl barely larger than an infant play Alma Redemptoris Mater, he dared not make his presence known until she was done. When she was, he picked her up, he kissed her on the forehead and told her she was a miracle from Heaven. He carried her downstairs to tell her parents, they wept as they knelt down in front of a statue of the Virgin. It was a miracle such as those of which their own parents always spoke. For twenty years, they never missed a Sunday, and every spare dollar not devoted to good works was devoted to music lessons for an extraordinary child who came from nowhere. </span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The only way she could have known about these keys was on those few times her father took her to see Uncle Ray (who couldn't see her of course), and Uncle Ray would play some songs on the piano for her while Carmen's father fixed some wiring in the lights (why Ray Charles needed lights nobody knew...) and Carmen watched the keys which Uncle Ray could not see as he played. As Carmen progressed, Uncle Ray was all too happy to give an occasional lesson in jazz whenever he was in town, and after the lesson was over, Carmen would be sent to play with a friend down the street with a couple dollars for candy while Uncle Ray gave Carmen's mother a lesson too. </span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">When Carmen's Ina told Uncle Ray heard about what happened, he sat her at the piano, and instead of playing Alma Redemptoris Mater, she harmonized a note perfect and slightly out of tempo What Would I Do Without You and sang the whole song, a few words were mispronounced as a four-year-old would without thinking of what she can't understand: "I get all closer to me," instead of "Aw, get all closer to me." Even a brilliant four-year-old plays like a brilliant four-year-old, but a four year old like this could astonish the world.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This narrator has little to no interest in the details of how she appeared on Ed Sullivan and Dick Clark's American Bandstand when she was seven. He has only a little interest in the details of the private piano teacher from Hungary, Mr. Nordau (Doctor Nordau), contracted directly from Universal Studios by Uncle Ray, who paid every cent of those lessons for twelve years, the methods and personal manner of Dr. Nordau turned her into an obedient girl savant until her fingertips bled. He would balance a coin upon her hands to teach her finger positioning, and when the coin fell off he would strike the hand with a ruler. By nine she'd already graduated from Beethoven Sonatas to Liszt Transcendental Etudes, so the red letter day was not when she mastered a new piece, it was when she graduated from a dime on her hand to a penny, from a penny to a nickel, from a nickel to a quarter. He also has little to no interest in the details of in the details of the other upper-middle-class immigrant teachers from Germany and Austria and Poland and Romania and Czechoslovakia and Italy and the Ukraine who taught her in the high school for science she insisted upon going to rather than a school for the performing arts, or who coached her in the various extracurriculars for which her abilities and work ethic could only be described, once again, as prodigious: drawing, dancing, German, French, Italian, English, creative writing, calculus, chemistry, biology, physics, philosophy, theology, history, current events... Still greater than her ability to assimilate information was how each teacher took it upon themselves, as though they were the only one to do so, to try to mentor Carmen and steer her in the direction of their field, as though netting such a prize achiever into their field would be the achievement that justified decades of surrendering some prestigious post-Hochshule career to put up with every worthless and verzogenes Gor und wildes Tier in the security of Southern California.</span></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">How did she imbibe so much information so quickly? Well, if one can reduce such ability to a practical application rather than divinely-mandated ability, her technique was to simply sing her facts. From the moment at five years old that she realized &